This film is not directed by Roland Emmerich

I still have a vivid memory from my senior year of college, of this one time I was confronted with the prospect of starting over an important paper from the very beginning. I guess the memory is not vivid enough for me to remember what the paper was about, but I do remember that about halfway through the writing -- and it was a long one -- I confronted the reality that it was not going as I had hoped. I could forge on with my current wrong trajectory, which is probably what I would have done nine times out of ten. Doing anything else was just too awful. Or, I could opt for that tenth time and bravely start over, to see if I could get it right the second time. I'm proud to say that I did start over and that I got an A on the paper. The other paper would most certainly not have been an A.

The reason I'm reminded of this was because of a similar, though far lower stakes episode last night. I had to start over my review of Geostorm because it was based on the false assumption that the movie was directed by Roland Emmerich. In fact, it was directed by Emmerich's old partner, Dean Devlin.

I discovered this at about 12:50 a.m., when I was giving the piece a last polish before submitting it, so my editor could run it first thing Friday morning.

So much for that.

It's too bad because I really liked my opening two paragraphs:


Few directors strive to rise above their directorial typecasting more poignantly than Roland Emmerich. When fellow schlockmeister Michael Bay tries to do that, it’s always a thinly veiled version of his usual bombast. But Emmerich really takes it in another direction. These efforts have been either reasonably well received (the Shakespeare unmasking movie Anonymous) or not reasonably well received (the gay rights history Stonewall), but they always result in the studio coming back to Emmerich and saying “Nope. Now go direct Geostorm.”

And direct Geostorm Emmerich has. Unfortunately, it also seems to be a thumb in the eye of those studios. It may be crediting Emmerich with too much control over the finer qualities of his schlock, but this seems just about the most by-the- numbers possible version of his brand of global apocalypse film, of which he has made about seven.


The blatant falsehood that opens the second paragraph is a humorous reminder of how wrong my assumptions were. I tried to get smart by writing the opening paragraph of my review before I'd even seen the movie, something I rarely do, but something that is possible if you plan to start only with overview and state nothing of substance in your opening words. The value of which can certainly be debated. I did it this time because I knew I was going to get home late and wanted to get a head start on the writing. In fact, I brought my computer with me and wrote most of the review on the tram ride home.

I might have been able to re-jigger those opening two paragraphs even at just before 1 a.m. last night if I hadn't also continued to make references to the man who did not direct Geostorm throughout the rest of the review. It was one reference too many. So I tabled the corrections for my morning break today.

And as it happened, my editor posted the thing so quickly that it was up on the site by my lunchtime anyway.

The same courage to start over was not required as it was in college, but it made me think of that story, and then I told you that story, and we are all better people for it.

And if you want to see what I thought of Geostorm, here is that post that is now up on the web for your perusal.

In short: I wish Roland Emmerich had directed it.

What's wrong with "what if"?

For the past two weeks, I've borne the burden of being one of the only people I know who's seen Anonymous ... and also one of the only critics who seems to have liked it. It's got exactly a 50 on Metacritic, which is, technically speaking, "mixed or average reviews." But the critics who like it seem sheepish about that fact -- those who don't are a lot bolder, buoyed by the implicit support of millions of snarky moviegoers, many of whom have not even seen it.

The reasons not to like Anonymous write themselves. It's directed by Roland Emmerich, an infamous hack responsible for idiocy like 10,000 B.C. It posits the idea that William Shakespeare did not write his own plays -- not a new idea, but also not a widely accepted one. And it includes numerous suppositions about what could have happened with other characters, many involving scandalous things about Queen Elizabeth -- such as the idea that she had several bastard children.

But it's this last point that people seem to be taking the most issue with, and not specifically because it besmirches Elizabeth's name. The doubts that Shakespeare wrote his own plays go back to before such luminaries and skeptics as Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud, and even the critics who didn't like the film can admit that it's an impressive accomplishment for its much-maligned director, who didn't seem capable of tackling such a subject. No, the critics looking to vent their aimless dislike for the film choose the fact that much of its action is imagined, and based only loosely on historical fact.

I say: So what?

Forget the fact that it's a movie, a work of fiction, and that it exists on the most fundamental level for the purpose of selling tickets. Loose interpretations of the facts, the altering of minor details, the rearranging of events in the chronology ... these things are to be expected in the attempt to make it work better as a narrative. And if done well, they contribute toward distilling the essence of truth, if not always literal truth.

So forget that we could allow this stuff for purely artistic reasons. What about the fact that pretty much every historical movie contains a sizable percentage of "what if"?

Since no one was present to record the conversations that occurred between 16th century noblemen, one must make guesses about the content of those conversations. It's the only way to go, unless you are so paralyzed with fears about inaccuracy that you stick to documenting only the things that exist in some kind of public record. And that would make for a pretty damn boring movie.

I guess what sticks in the craw of this film's detractors is how many liberties were apparently taken. To suggest that one of England's most celebrated queens spawned several fatherless children and jumped from bed to bed seems like sacrilege to some.

But if you parse that argument, it suggests that you should only make conservative guesses about things that may have happened with real people. If you play it safe, you are in the clear. But since when does a good drama play it safe? One of my favorite things about Anonymous is how much balls it has -- not only for its depiction of Elizabeth, but for suggesting that Shakespeare may have been just an opportunistic miscreant, wrapped up in unsavory deeds all the way up to and including actual murder. (This last is not stated outright but merely intimated.)

And why can't we take Shakespeare off this pedestal? I just finished listening to a podcast that's new to my repertoire called The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith, where he talks to Anonymous screenwriter John Orloff about not only the incredibly ambitious structure of the script, but plenty of the issues related to the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. Orloff, a so-called Oxfordian (which means he doubts the authorship), and Goldsmith, a so-called Stratfordian (which means he doesn't), go at it pretty well regarding some of the contentious facts about the case. In every instance I thought that Orloff -- who has studied this more than Goldsmith, granted -- scored a point off Goldsmith, convincing me even more than his movie did that Shakespeare was not who history says he was. Without going into too many of the specifics, let me just outline a few: 1) It is known that both Shakespeare's parents and his children were illiterate. 2) No document exists from that period that was written in his hand, making him a total anomaly among his contemporaries. 3) The plays imply a knowledge of French, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Latin, and Shakespeare never went to school. 4) A third of his plays take place in Italy and describe it in great detail, though Shakespeare never actually traveled there. 5) All the conditions that likely needed to have been in place for him to write those plays, were actually in place for a nobleman like Edward de Vere, who's played by Rhys Ifans in the movie.

What's more, there's an actual academic theory that de Vere and Elizabeth were lovers, which gives a scholarly justification to even some of the film's most controversial "what if"s.

But let's dial back down to just the idea of "what if"s. We allow "what if"s to enter into many of the movies we love, in two distinctly different ways: 1) What if it did actually happen this way? 2) What if it had actually happened this way? Let's not forget that one of the most celebrated films of the last few years, Inglourious Basterds, includes an alternate reading of World War II that we know did not happen -- it's simply fantasy. Hitler never died in a rain of gunfire at the hands of a couple American commandos who were also setting a movie theater on fire. Yet that film was nominated for best picture and showed up near the top of a number of best-of lists.

But you don't even have to offer wild examples of alternate histories, and you don't even have to go particularly far into the past. One of the most realistic films of the past ten years was 2006's United 93, which imagines what might have happened on board the doomed September 11th flight when the passengers revolted against the terrorists, bringing the aircraft down in a Pennsylvania field. There are only a few things known about what actually did happen -- such as Todd Beamer saying "Let's roll" -- so the rest is up to the imagination of a screenwriter. Sure, that screenwriter (Paul Greengrass) stayed pretty much within the bounds of what "probably" happened -- he didn't suggest that aliens beamed aboard the plane and took out the terrorists.

But is saying that Elizabeth might have had illegitimate children the same thing as saying that aliens intervened with the September 11th attacks? I don't think it is. I think it's very possible that Elizabeth had illegitimate children, and just because we don't know about them doesn't mean we can't infer their existence based on things we do know ... and that we can't write a script in which they do actually exist.

And let's not forget that there is already a very famous movie -- an Oscar winner, in fact -- that imagines a lot of things that Shakespeare might or might not have done. That movie, Shakespeare in Love, was met with almost universal acclaim. There was no controversy about what was depicted, or at least no controversy that reached the layman -- no one ever had a big problem with the idea that Shakespeare might have shaken a bad case of writer's block at the hands of a muse who won his heart.

And you know why that is? Because it was unambiguously positive toward Shakespeare. If you do doubt that Shakespeare wrote his plays -- which I certainly now do, though it does not affect my appreciation of them in the slightest, because I still find it incredibly impressive that someone wrote them -- what's wrong with suggesting that he may have had some unsavory traits? A man who accepted a deal like that, to be a front for works he didn't write, is morally compromised at the very least.

And if you're saying you only want positive interpretations of Shakespeare on film, then you are just being an intellectually dishonest film fan.

Oh, and remember how I briefly mentioned Sigmund Freud earlier? He too is a character in a film releasing in the fall of 2011, which will have to suppose a lot of things about him: David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method.

Okay, so you can't object to the idea that Shakespeare might not have written his plays, and you can't object to Emmerich's execution of the story, and you can't object to the details of the story -- unless you're simply saying you would have made other choices if you yourself were the screenwriter, and that's kind of splitting hairs.

So, like, what's your big problem?

Go see this thing before it whimpers out of theaters for good, with none of your money. Which it's worked harder than most films to deserve.

Everything but a horror movie

It's the Friday before Halloween ... do you know where your horror movies are?

Who'd have thought we'd so notice the absence (for the first time since 2003) of a new Saw movie? Now there are simply no scary movies being released on the Friday before Halloween. How unlikely.

Okay, maybe not so unlikely ... Paranormal Activity 3 and The Thing both came out earlier in the month, presumably to put more asses in the seats before Halloween actually rolled around. Smart strategy.

And perhaps that's why counter-programming is so abundant on the October 28, 2011 release date. Without a perceived front-runner for this weekend's box office dollars -- that is, a perceived front-runner among new releases, as all movies will be grappling with the phenomenon known as Paranormal Activity 3 -- a number of other movies have jumped up to the fore to stake their claim to this weekend's available dollars.

In fact, I now have to laugh at myself for this post, in which I wondered whether March 10, 2011 might be the busiest release date of all time. In retrospect it seems quite funny, especially now that I've seen all the movies that came out on that date, and they were no great shakes. I contended that Battle: Los Angeles, Red Riding Hood, Mars Needs Moms and Jane Eyre (which I later discovered was only opening in limited release) were about as hot as it got for movies releasing on one date. Of course, now I know that only Jane Eyre is actually a really good movie, with Mars Needs Moms being decent and the other two being guilty-pleasure laughable at best.

Clearly, back then, I wasn't expecting a release date like October 28th, 2011.

Roland Emmerich goes legit

The movie I've been looking forward to most for a couple months now is Anonymous, Roland Emmerich's attempt to lift himself out of the bowels of the disaster movie gutter and contribute something thoughtful to the world of cinema. I've discussed previously that I love a genre I've made up called the "wax-stamp movie," which is any movie in which the production design is such that a wax seal either is or could be used. (You know, the kind used to keep a parchment letter from coming open, back in the day.)

Anonymous certainly qualifies in that regard. Which makes it the last movie I would have expected Emmerich to direct.

I'm going to choose not to hold his previous career against him and go in to this movie with an open mind -- especially since it looks fantastic. And Emmerich's most recent film, 2012, is actually my favorite film he's ever directed, so maybe he's finally figured out how to do this job after so many years in the business.

The thing I wonder in a humorous sort of way is whether this will become one of those "issue" movies. I don't know how I started thinking this, but it seems that when a director (or star, or producer, or what have you) makes a movie on a certain sociopolitical hot-button topic, they sometimes try to spread the word about whatever the particular cause is, during rounds of press interviews and (if it works out this way) during award-show acceptance speeches.

I don't think Emmerich will win -- or probably even get nominated for -- an Oscar for this movie, but I do think it'll be funny if he decides he needs to take up the campaign about whether Shakespeare really was a fraud. Which wouldn't be a very popular cause to promote in the same way that, you know, gay rights (Milk) or water contamination (Erin Brockovich) may have seemed like causes their stars or directors needed to promote.

Shirking Shrek

I couldn't find online the one poster that first gave me the idea for my take on Puss in Boots, the spin-off from the Shrek franchise starring the voice of Antonio Banderas. That poster gives my sub-heading a bit more meaning than the poster I've chosen does.

It was actually a billboard, and I started seeing it on my drive home from work a month or two ago. It shows a vaguely expressionistic, purple-colored drawing of the face of a cat with the name Puss in Boots below it.

No reference to Shrek, and certainly no visual call-out to the signature Dreamworks animation style that made the title character in this new movie famous. (Man, really wish I could locate that image.)

But this poster here is enough different from the vaguely bulbous animation style of the Shrek movies, and few if any of the posters make a reference to this film's origins within the Shrek universe.

Curious, right?

Latin American chaos

Speaking of posters that do or don't do what they're supposed to do, I find the Rum Diary posters to be some of the most effective I've seen in a long time.

Pair the posters with the trailers and you get a terrific environs in which to set a movie:

Latin American chaos.

There's something I find primitively exciting about the potential for bacchanalian drunken chaos set in a country where they speak Spanish. Do you get me? ("We get you sir!") (Hmm, don't know where that came from. Starship Troopers, I think. )

Anyway, the trailer put me in the perfect mood to imagine a series of wild adventures, many of them actually or theoretically involving rum, in the vaguely lawless version of Puerto Rico created for this movie.

Granted, Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States, and in that sense is not really Latin American. But you get what I'm going for, I think. Anyway, you said you did two paragraphs ago. Let's just say this movie looks really fun and I am very excited to see it. (And it could be the Hunter S. Thompson-ness of this movie, more than its Latin American-ness, that I'm responding to.)

One thing I think will be interesting -- and I really should read more about this -- is that this is the director's first movie in 19 years. Bruce Robinson, a name I vaguely recognized, last directed the movie Jennifer 8 in 1992. Love to hear how he found his way back into the director's chair after all these years -- especially in a high-profile project starring Johnny Depp.

Justin Timberlake, action star

It's rather amazing to me how many films Justin Timberlake has now made -- he crossed over from being primarily a singer to primarily an actor a couple years ago -- and he has yet to appear in what you would call an action role. He's got the features for it, it just didn't happen until now.

And when it did happen, that action role had to be in service of a high-concept science fiction plot.

In Time may not end up being a good movie -- in fact, I'm starting to be worried that it won't be -- but it won't seem like some kind of cash-in for Timberlake either. This apparent update of Logan's Run is clearly a movie with ideas, even if they may not end up getting executed effectively.

Just reminds me again how smart Timberlake's choices have always been. Sure, he's made the occasional dud like The Love Guru, but far more often he's selecting material that is interesting or challenging in some way, such as Alpha Dog, Black Snake Moan and The Social Network.

Okay, okay, so 2011 hasn't been his greatest year on record. I haven't seen them, but I hear that Bad Teacher and Friends With Benefits are nothing to write home about.

Look, I just want to praise the guy. Is that okay with you?

The smart romance

It occurs to me that Like Crazy, as original as it will probably be in many ways, is the latest in a string of similar movies that we hope will be a "smart romance."

It may just be me and I may be just taking a very quick look at it, but doesn't this movie remind you a little bit of things like (500) Days of Summer and One Day?

Which is not to say that Like Crazy borrows from either movie -- it seems to be a far less whimsical affair than (500) Days, and it was made pretty much at the same time as One Day, only One Day happened to release a couple months earlier.

More than anything I'm identifying a hunger for independent movies in which two beautiful young actors -- not too beautiful, just beautiful enough -- are involved in some kind of lyrical, semi-tragic romance. You could probably throw in a movie like Blue Valentine, even though that movie is presumably a lot sadder than this one.

Well, I didn't particularly care for (500) Days and I didn't see One Day, whose negative reviews kept me away. But I admit this hunger in myself, and so I'm hoping Like Crazy is good. If the reaction it received at Sundance is any indication, it will be.

*******

More than anything, this weekend at the movies marks an unofficial start to the cinematic home stretch of 2011. Two weeks ago we got a pair of remakes, and last weekend was dominated by the genre giant Paranormal Activity 3. Next week it's November, and many of the year's high-profile award contenders are going to start hitting the theaters with regularity.

Before I get stressed out about all the things I can't see -- Martha Marcy May Marlene and Take Shelter already in theaters -- I'll just try to focus on which of the above movies I'll see this weekend. As of now, Anonymous is the top contender, with Rum Diary a close second.

One thing I can tell you I won't be seeing this weekend:

A horror movie.

In the theater, anyway. On video? Hell yeah! At least one if not several.

It's Halloween weekend, after all.

Posters of the apocalypse

We love movies about the end of the world, don't we?

Even if we know there's a high likelihood they will suck, our excitement overwhelms us -- doesn't it?

But I'm wondering if that phenomenon wouldn't be half as powerful without a tradition of truly captivating posters ... which, a lot of times, were for movies that really sucked.

It remains to be seen what we'll think of Battle: Los Angeles, but I can tell you that the poster you see above absolutely thrilled me. It perfectly accomplishes what posters for apocalyptic movies set out to do -- it provides a single-image encapsulation of the idea of normal life supplanted by chaos. What better way to indicate "business as usual" turned upside down, than surfers waiting for the next big wave as aliens rain the heavens with artillery fire?

It's that mixture of everyday things we recognize and exotic things we don't recognize that makes the image so powerful. And that's why I think the poster for Battle: LA you see below is not as effective:

Sure, there's a basic impressiveness here: A single soldier stands and looks at ... something. We don't know what. And that's part of the problem. Is it an alien craft? Is it a chunk of land turned up on its side, and the spiky objects we're seeing are buildings or other parts of the industrial landscape? We can't really tell. It still makes me want to see the movie, but not the way the surfing poster makes me want to see the movie.

So I thought today it would be fun to go back and look at other posters of the apocalypse, and to dissect how they used familiar images to whet our appetite for the movie in question ... and whether that whetted appetite ended up resulting in a satisfying movie.

Let's start with the most recent obvious example, which also has a whole series of posters associated with it:

2012 (2009, Roland Emmerich)


These posters are, frankly, perfect. They are ludicrous at the same time that they are somehow deliciously plausible. Waves crashing over the Himalayas? Not on your life would that ever happen. But would I like to see a movie where it happens? Yup, I think so. Emmerich et al were also smart to use the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil, since it has a basic awesomeness that is enhanced by collapsing under the weight of a tidal wave. The final image is interesting to me, referencing the most orgiastic destruction depicted in the movie, when plate tectonics rip apart the west side of Los Angeles. It's interesting because there's a billboard for Battle: Los Angeles that features the same section of town, with those artillery blasts from the surfing poster above -- I'm wondering if that's an intentional allusion (or else direct theft) from the 2012 advertising campaign.

Was it worth it? I thought so, yes. The destruction was great on its own terms, and just removed enough that you didn't have to ponder the billions of people who were dying. Some criticized the movie for that very reason, and for dozens of other reasons, not the least of which is that they have a knee-jerk hatred for everything made by Roland Emmerich. I did previously as well, but this one really worked for me. And speaking of Emmerich ...

The Day After Tomorrow (2004, Roland Emmerich)


Emmerich tried to capitalize on our fears of climate change with The Day After Tomorrow, and this poster was a good start. The Statue of Liberty, up to her nose in snow? My God! AND IT MAY BE HAPPENING AS SOON AS TWO DAYS FROM NOW!

Was it worth it? Not really. The Day After Tomorrow was silly. I was able to appreciate it only on the level of seeing some of the special effects, but to be honest, the catastrophic phenomenon depicted here does not lend itself to effects the way some of his other phenomena do. In fact, the scene I remember most was where tornadoes were ripping apart Los Angeles, which doesn't even really jive with the rest of the movie. Emmerich basically threw it in there because he could. And speaking of uses of the Statue of Liberty ...

Cloverfield (2008, Matt Reeves)


The Day After Tomorrow poster shows only the statue's head, while this poster shows only the statue's body -- because the head has been ripped off its shoulders by a giant reptilian alien. The smart thing about the Cloverfield poster is that it reminds everyone of their first exposure to the movie, which was that great teaser trailer that went viral in late 2007, in which the final shot is the statue's head coming to a rest in the street somewhere, uptown from Liberty Island. The events depicted in Cloverfield may not lead to the end of the world, but who knows ... they may.

Was it worth it? HELLS yes. Cloverfield was awesome. I got it on BluRay for Christmas and am looking forward to my third viewing. And speaking of the Statue of Liberty again ...

Planet of the Apes (1968, Franklin J. Schaffner)


Of course, all these other movies' usages of the Statue of Liberty owe a debt to how it was used as a gut punch at the end of Planet of the Apes. Having this iconic image sunken into the sand just killed us -- and by "us," I mean people who saw it in the theater, which does not include me, as I was not born for another five years.

Was it worth it? Well, duh -- Planet of the Apes is a classic. However, I have to wonder if this poster was used to advertise it at the time, or only in retrospect. I'm thinking retrospect. Given that it was a highly guarded secret that this ape planet was Earth, intended to Shyamalan us 30 years before Shyamalan, I doubt they would have revealed it in the original advertising campaign. But back to Roland Emmerich ...

Independence Day (1996, Roland Emmerich)


Emmerich first started blowing up the world back in 1996, with Independence Day. Talk about making it personal for us -- the White House getting blasted by an alien laser beam became the signature image of the film. And there's something about when you get to the president, who should be untouchable, that really strikes a chord with us. In fact, you could say that the White House bit worked so well, Emmerich intentionally alluded to it in 2012 with the scene where the capsized battleship flattens the White House, after riding on the crest of a tidal wave. That one scene is like every exciting thing from every disaster movie, rolled into one. (The Empire State building poster looks nicer and is good, too -- and certainly wouldn't have been possible post-9/11).

Was it worth it? I am not a fan of Independence Day. But I did like those few scenes with maximum possible destruction. They lived up to what I was expecting. And speaking of tidal waves ...

Deep Impact (1998, Mimi Leder)


Both asteroid movies that came out in 1998 were all about the tidal wave that was going to destroy the world, but only Deep Impact emphasized these in the ad campaign, while Armageddon focused more on the heroic and patriotic oil riggers-turned-astronauts. Although this poster cheeses it up a bit by showing the human drama implied by the world's coastal regions being violently drenched, the sight of the wave bearing down on New York City captures the situation pretty well.

Was it worth it? Yeah, I really liked Deep Impact -- in part because of the human drama I just poked fun at a minute ago. What can I say, I'm a sap. I should probably see it again to be sure, but I really liked it.

Okay, this post is getting long, so let's hurry through these last couple:

The Core (2003, Jon Amiel)


Talk about preposterous ... the idea behind The Core was that the Earth's core had stopped, and some scientists/adventurers had to drill into it to jump-start it. This presented all kinds of visual problems about how to represent the threat, and what they ended up with was merely adequate. Not only is the part of the Earth's surface shown in this image too abstract to make out, making the threat abstract as well, but the deep fissure depicted here is not actually the outcome of the threat -- more than anything else, it shows the hole they'd have to burrow to get down to the core.

Was it worth it? Hopefully the abstract advertisements kept people away, because this movie was not good. However, not knowing exactly where the threat is did not matter here ...

The Day After (1986, Nicholas Meyer)


This is cheating a little bit -- The Day After was a TV movie rather than a theatrical release, so our appetite for it was not whetted by a poster. In fact, this image probably accompanied the eventual video release. But the nuclear blast in the middle of an American city is so effective that it doesn't really matter which city it is -- though I believe the action was set around Kansas City.

Was it worth it? To this day I still identify The Day After with all my fears of nuclear annihilation. It was damn effective.

I had a couple more I was going to do, but all the image files attached to this post were causing Blogger to act funny -- images disappearing (possibly being "behind" other images), etc. So I'll just leave off there. You've had enough. I'll let you off the hook.

Michael Bay vs. Roland Emmerich

Michael Bay gets a bad rap.

At least, compared to Roland Emmerich.

You would agree that Bay and Emmerich, throughout their careers, have indulged in essentially the same brand of disaster porn, to borrow a phrase I heard on the radio last night. Both love explosions. Both love end-of-the-world scenarios. And both love to cram as much high melodrama as possible into those exploding end-of-the-world scenarios.

Yet Roland Emmerich enjoys relative anonymity among average filmgoers, while Michael Bay is so stigmatized by the movies he's made that he's become a household name. In fact, I'd argue that even dumb people see Michael Bay movies in spite of themselves -- that's how far the cultural besmirching of Bay's name, encouraged by snarky entertainment writers like myself, has extended.

I'm not saying it's not deserved.

But it's just as deserved for Emmerich, if not more so. In fact, since Emmerich's films have been just as high-profile, and just as poorly received, as Bay's, I'd argue that the main reason he is not widely perceived as the same kind of poster child for crap is that his name is all foreign, and therefore, harder to remember. (Emmerich was born in West Germany; Bay, appropriately, in L.A.)

The thing is, I don't actually know myself which one is worse. I have my suspicions, but I can't say for certain. And so it is that I've devised a little system to determine who is worse -- for me, anyway. I can't speak for you.

See, I noticed recently that Bay and Emmerich have very similar careers. Not just their subject matter, but the period they've been working as well. Both directors are 44 years old, Emmerich just having celebrated that birthday a week ago today. Emmerich got started in his career earlier, but he didn't direct a true blockbuster until 1994, when Stargate came out. (He'd directed the largely unseen Universal Soldier two years earlier, and then a couple totally unseen projects before that.) Bay got started a year after Stargate with Bad Boys. Each has been steadily contributing their unique brand of schlock since then.

And I realized something else: After 2012, which I saw last night, I have seen exactly seven films by each director. The last seven films, in fact, as I never saw the original Bad Boys (though I did see the sequel), and I've seen every Emmerich film since Stargate (Stargate included). Pity me, dear reader.

Could this comparison line up any more perfectly?

So here's what I will do -- and I use the future tense, as I have not actually done it as I type these words. I will rank Bay's and Emmerich's films from 1 through 14, "best" to worst. And then I will add up their personal rankings within those rankings. Lowest score wins.

I will tell you this, hence revealing my bias -- Emmerich would have fared a lot worse in this duel before I saw 2012 last night. But more on that in a moment.

Now please excuse me for a moment or three as I go off and make my rankings. To you, it will seem instantaneous.

Without further ado, and with short explanations for each:

1. 2012 (2009, Roland Emmerich). Yes, Emmerich's newest film is the best of the bunch. Really. More on that in a moment.
2. The Rock (1996, Michael Bay). Yes, Bay's oldest film is the second best of the bunch. I guess he hadn't learned his terrible tendency toward bombast yet. Followed by ...
3. Stargate (1994, Roland Emmerich). ... Emmerich's oldest film (that I've seen). I don't remember much about it, but when it comes to these two directors, that probably means it was decent.
4. Transformers (2007, Michael Bay). Controversial ranking. It worked for me.
5. Pearl Harbor (2001, Michael Bay). Again, controversial. I found myself defending this movie upon leaving the theater. It has not held up in my mind, but I can't forget that I did that. So sue me.
6. Independence Day (1996, Roland Emmerich). I really think this film is bad, but not compared to the others lower on this list.
7. The Day After Tomorrow (2004, Roland Emmerich). Again, bad. But the pickings are getting slim.
8. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009, Michael Bay). Held my attention for a surprisingly long time, before it didn't.
9. Godzilla (1998, Roland Emmerich). Good destruction, bad everything else.
10. Bad Boys II (2003, Michael Bay). Not good. Watchable in parts.
11. The Patriot (2000, Roland Emmerich). I think I disliked this film more than most people. I really, really disliked it. Fewest explosions in any Emmerich movie, except maybe Stargate.
12. Armageddon (1998, Michael Bay). Not only did it suffer terribly in comparison to 1998's other asteroid movie, Deep Impact, but it's also Bay's most shamelessly jingoistic film. Blecch.
13. The Island (2005, Michael Bay). Bay's worst film. In part because it had such an interesting beginning, and then became 100% ridiculous.
14. 10,000 B.C. (2008, Roland Emmerich). Emmerich's worst film, and the worst of the bunch. Just awful. I can't even bring myself to say any more about it.

Michael Bay: 2 + 4 + 5 + 8 + 10 + 12 + 13 = 54
Roland Emmerich: 1 + 3 + 6 + 7 + 9 + 11 + 14 = 51

Well well well. Roland Emmerich wins. I have to say, I was not expecting that.

In fact, I will admit to you now: This post was envisioned to show you that Roland Emmerich is actually worse than Michael Bay, or at least just as bad. (Originally conceived title: "Just as bad as Bay?") But I thought I should give each a chance to have that assessment "scientifically" tested. And it turns out, Emmerich is not quite as bad.

And he has 2012 to thank. If 2012 had been half the train wreck many were expecting it to be, Bay certainly would have won this duel. But it isn't. You can argue until the cows come home about the tastelessness of all this orgiastic destruction in a post-9/11 America ... but then again, you could have argued the same thing about The Day After Tomorrow. The fact is, the destruction sequences in this film are hypnotic; Emmerich somehow manages yet new ways to envision the end of the world even after already doing that twice in Tomorrow and Independence Day.

But what really makes 2012 better than any Emmerich film -- any film by either director -- is the writing. I understand that this is a frankly shocking statement. However, the dialogue was good, the film moved a long at a good pace (it was actually a brisk 158 minutes), and there were few scenes that did not clearly contribute to the trajectory of the story. Plus, there were some really smartly timed reveals of previously unknown information. And Emmerich himself actually deserves the credit for this, having co-written the script with Harald Kloser. Just one quibble about the script: the repetition. Not only do planes take off three different times just prior to being engulfed by the earth, but the writers flog the joke where somebody says "I think we've seen the worst of it" right before another giant fissure opens up.

The biggest surprise, however, is that the acting is not hammy. John Cusack probably sets that tone, and a handful of talented actors -- Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Woody Harrelson, Amanda Peet, and yes, in this case, Danny Glover -- manage to maintain it. What do they all have in common? Roland Emmerich was directing them. Good on ya, Roland. You're learning.

A couple other random thoughts from watching 2012:

1) If you're planning to watch a 158-minute movie, it's a good idea to pee twice before it starts, if you can. That's right, I peed twice last night at the theater -- once about ten minutes before screening time, and once during the commercials that precede the trailers. I got little more than dribbles the second time, but it helped me hold out.

2) If you're planning to watch a 158-minute movie, Reese's Pieces make a great choice to sustain you through the movie. Long after your popcorn -- which sometimes runs out during the trailers -- is gone, you'll still have plenty of the no less than 492 individual pieces in that surprisingly large bag. In fact, I ate my last few with less than ten minutes left in the movie. And yes, I did feel sort of sick from all that peanut butter. But I got the sustained regular eating experience I desired, without having to consciously monitor my intake.

3) If the world does indeed end on December 21, 2012, I might just be okay with it. Sound crazy? Here's my thinking. If the Mayans were in fact able to predict the end of the world thousands of years ago, it means somewhat definitively that our world can't be explained by science alone. This also means that maybe, just maybe, there is an actual afterlife where we will all go after that apocalyptic 24-hour period. It'll be pretty crowded, but hey -- the consciousness will live on. If science can't explain the Mayans' prediction -- they couldn't have been that good at astronomy, nor fully comprehended the deadly consequences of planetary alignments -- then who's to say that all the other stuff with no scientific proof, like religion, can't be true? And that's about as religious as I get.

An appropriately weighty way to end a post about two guys who specialize in ridiculous spectacle, don't you think?

Also, how do you rank these directors' films? I'd be surprised if many -- any -- of you had the displeasure of seeing all 14 films I discussed above. But let me know how you weigh in on the ones you did deign to see.

Where's my Pompeii movie??

My wife and I went to a very disappointing exhibit yesterday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which featured art of Pompeii and the Roman Villa.

There were a number of reasons it was disappointing, but the one that hit me long before entry was the price for admission: $25 a head. Add in the fact that we purchased our tickets online (which proved unnecessary), and the thing came to $54 for the two of us. When did a casual Sunday afternoon stroll through the museum get so expensive?

With that kind of outlay, we felt we had the right to expect a real multi-media assault, something we could accurately classify as an "experience." But the Pompeii exhibit was little more than a bunch of paintings hung on walls, and busts of statues in glass cases. We didn't have to pay any extra for those audio devices where you push the button and listen to the curator talk about the pieces, but often times I didn't even feel like they'd selected the correct pieces to talk about, leaving more interesting ones tantalizingly undiscussed.

I later on joked on facebook that for $25 a head, they should have given us an actual erupting volcano.

And then that got me thinking:

Where's my Pompeii movie?

In an age when Roland Emmerich spends a kajillion dollars every couple years to create ridiculous fictitious disasters to try to knock our socks off (the Statue of Liberty buried in snow in The Day After Tomorrow, ocean waves crashing over the Himalayas in this December's 2012), why doesn't someone sit down and devote a blockbuster budget to one of the planet's great real disasters? (I'm also still looking for the film about the hurricane that wiped out Galveston, Texas in 1900, but that's a story for another time.)

It plays terrifically in my mind's eye: You have the ornate period architecture of a movie like Gladiator, pelted with raining volcanic rock and washed away in floods of lava. Plus, the whole thing took place by the Bay of Naples, meaning you could have the A.D. 79 watercraft trying vainly to escape in the roiled sea, giving the chance for some cool shipwrecks.

With that kind of budget, you might have to tack on a Titanic-style love story to push the audience beyond just young males. But then again, most of these disaster movies try to have Titanic-style love stories anyway, so this isn't much of a concession. Plus, those interested in Italian antiquity would also have to see it, wouldn't they?

It might even be a good project for Robert Zemeckis, whose motion capture animation style is getting more sophisticated all the time. Zemeckis' technique wasn't perfected yet for The Polar Express, but it did wonders making Beowulf such a memorable experience. (Zemeckis' next test will be A Christmas Carol, also out this December, starring Jim Carrey as Scrooge).

When I can think of an obvious idea, I feel pretty sure that thousands of other people have already thought of it before me, and that some of them would have the wherewithal to actually start production on a film like this. So naturally I turned to IMDB.

It turns out there actually is a movie in the works called Pompeii with a tentative release date of 2011. It's an adaptation of a novel by Robert Harris, and it is briefly synopsized thus: "A dramatic thriller set against the backdrop of Mt. Vesuvius just before and during its eruption." I'd have to have IMDB Pro to get more information, but I can see that Roman Polanski was once attached as director, so I doubt this is the F/X extravaganza I'm looking for.

However, researching more about Harris' novel on wikipedia tells me that it could be. The plot itself seems to involve aqueducts and water flow and period-appropriate science that doesn't necessarily sound like the stuff of a popcorn movie, but it does also contain a fictitious Roman character (interacting with some real Roman characters) returning to rescue his daughter during the eruption of Vesuvius. More tellingly, it also reveals that the film version had been greenlit with a projected $150 million budget, but that the threat of strike by the Screen Actors Guild had put the project on hold.

I still don't know what Polanski would have done with a big F/X budget. Maybe when I see Roland Emmerich slotted in to replace him, I'll know we're on the right track. (In a manner of speaking, anyway -- Emmerich will get the volcanic eruptions, but he'll ruin everything else).

So I'm looking forward to 2011, or maybe 2012 (though not 2012). Maybe then I'll feel like I finally got my money's worth from yesterday's exhibit.