Forget about Uwe Boll. The German director fans really should forget is Roland Emmerich, a man with a non-stop string of far-too-serious and mediocre at best disaster films on his resume. Think Boll's a hack? At least his stuff has some humor value to it -- intentional or not -- while Emmerich is entirely soulless, like a lesser (and less creative) Michael Bay. And yet, like Bay, Emmerich's films continue to be a license to pretty much print money and with his end of the world picture 2012 dominating the box office all around the globe, now seems an appropriate time to look at some views of the end of the world that don't suck quite so bad.
Well... the end of the world part may suck a bit but the films themselves don't.
Mad Max
With George Miller having re-cast the iconic character -- it's Tom Hardy from Bronson and Rock N Rolla -- and started production on the fourth entry in the iconic series, now's a good time to go back to the days before Mel Gibson outed himself as a drunken, racist ass and remind ourselves why he mattered in the first place. It wasn't until The Road Warrior -- now out on BluRay! -- that Gibson and the series would really hit their stride but head right on back to the beginning to witness one of the most striking collapses of civilization ever caught on film.
Brazil
Sure, the end of the world may not have arrived yet in Terry Gilliam's Brazil but it can't be far off. The undisputed master work by one of cinema's most unique voices, the dystopic Brazil is disturbingly prescient now with its vision of underground terrorist cells, neo-fascism, population control through media manipulation and a rising obsession with plastic surgery. It's also very, very funny in a very bleak way and absolutely gorgeous to look at. How can you resist a film that casts Robert De Niro as a renegade heating engineer? Answer: You shouldn't.
The Road
Opening next week is John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road -- as bleak a picture as you will ever see in wide release. Dimension Films has been sitting on this one for about a year now, just trying to figure out what the hell to do with it. It's not that it isn't good -- it is, very -- but because it took until after the picture was finished for anyone to realize that a film in which a father roams a desolate countryside wondering whether it would've been kinder to just kill his son at birth rather than forcing him to live through the hell that life has become isn't the easiest thing in the world to market, even with Viggo Mortensen in the lead.
For those looking for something on the big screen before next week, well, the long fallow period we've been waiting out is finally coming to an end. Yeah, the latest Twilight picture is the big release this week but this week also brings us Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans -- a wildly over-the-top and completely daft movie that is Nicolas Cage's first really watchable picture since Adaptation and just hugely entertaining. It was one of my favorites at this year's Toronto International Film Festival and you can read my full review here. This one is relying almost entirely on word of mouth to get people to the theater and it'll probably disappear fast, so get to it quick, while you've still got the chance.