Metallica has been dead for years. Sometime after their late 80′s epic …And Justice For All, the members of Metallica took their epic metal noodlings out behind the woodshed and shot them dead. Then they came back into the studio, and wrote an album of interstital music for sporting events. That album made them unfathomably rich, and Craptallica was born.

Craptallica has gone on to release several more albums that were barely worth downloading. Their idiot drummer flew into rage at their fan base for stealing. Then their idiot leader went into rehab, and they made an movie that played like an epic two and a half hour therapy session. The album, and its “anger from a positive place” , all but vanished.

In the face of epic failure, they hired uber-guru Rick Rubin to produce a “comeback” album; which is a misnomer, since Craptallica hasn’t succeeded at anything, they have no place to “come back” from. Mr. Rubin encouraged the band to get back to their roots, and Craptallica happily complied.

That album is Death Magnetic, and it’s positively craptastic.  From the get-go, it simply sounds horrible. Numerous audio engineers complain that the album is overly compressed, giving it a high, thin tone. It sounds like you’re listening through an empty can of soda. The low end of the audio spectrum has a spectral presence at best. The airy whump of the drums doesn’t move a thing, and provides a vaporous foundation for the rest of the music. Similarly, Kirk Hammett’s guitar soloing has never been weaker. Even with a full stomp of wah-wah pedal, there’s no bite behind it.

After multiple listens, the songs simply fail to make an impression.  They’re weightless grab-bags of guitar riffs, tied together seemingly at random.  Hetfield’s lyrics have the authenticity of a Prada bag in a Chinatown market. The only thing that sticks to Death Magnetic is boredom.

The root of the problem isn’t just Metallica, it’s our culture as a whole. We’re a culture of zombies, refusing to let anything die. Metallica shouldn’t have existed beyond 1990. If they stopped at the ‘black’ album, few people would begrudged their cashing in on their legacy. But everything beyond that is reprehensible, and should never have existed.

The things that fuelled Metallica’s greatness in the early albums died with the success of the ‘black’ album. Alcohol fuelled twenty-one year olds with anger issues are primed for crafting angry music. Forty year olds who are wealthier than Croesus cannot do it. Until we are culturally primed to accept death with dignity, we’re going to be stuck with these endless, pointless retreads.

“The first stage is loss of speech. The second stage is physical disorientation. The third stage is fatal.

These are the symptoms of watching this trailer.

The Happening is M. Night Sham-alan’s newest descent into the bizarre and unexplained world of disappointment. With its cornucopia of overtly-stylized nonsense, this preview conjures up enough memories of “Lady in the Water” that I can only hope a bunch of trees will try to kill me (spoiler alert).

And because this is a trailer review, I can beat all the other film critics to the punch and be the first to christen this movie “The Crappening”

- Steve Jarczak”

Bravo, Steve. Couldn’t be said any better.

Conspiracy stories are the post-modern era’s religion. The powers that shape, control, and run the world are so distant that one can’t help but ask “what if”? Ancient man told fireside tales of gods chasing the sun across the sky. Modern man tells tales of grassy knolls, rigged elections, and government conspiracies that suppress the poor for the gain of the rich.

This makes great material for movies. One man fighting to uncover the truth hidden by a shadowy, all-powerful cabal is the setup for countless exciting movies. Unfortunately, with its ham-handed execution, Shooter misfires.

The premise is intriguing on paper: what if the lone gunman was the good guy? Mark Wahlberg plays Bud Lee Swagger, a reclusive ex-military sniper who gets recruited to stop a presidential assassination. Yes, that’s really the characters name. Sadly, instead of living up to such a colorful, good ol’ boy moniker, Wahlberg appears to have been directed by an angry swarm of bees. There’s an awful lot of angry squinting going on, and even though he can put a bullet in a can of stew from a mile away, you want to suggest that he get his eyes checked.

Antoine Fuqua, the director, is compiling a body of work that examines heroic machismo. His leading men are dripping masses of testosterone, trapped in a dogged pursuit of a single-minded goal and ready to engage in any necessary acts of violence to achieve it. Bruce Willis slogged through Tears Of The Sun and Clive Owen moped through King Arthur. Fuqua most notably presided over Training Day with Denzel Washington, which is one of the most beguiling and incandescent performances captured on film in recent years. Washington’s bad cop was an evil, charismatic bully; pure greed and power and sexual rapaciousness running unchecked. When he was on screen, it’s almost impossible to look away.

Unfortunately, Willis and Owen didn’t fare nearly as well under Fuqua’s direction. Tears Of The Sun was a lugubrious mess, and King Arthur almost unwatchably murky. In Children Of Men, Owen almost succeeds in making a silent mope of a guy into a compelling hero. Wahlberg was Oscar nominated for his volatile (and Training Day worthy) performance in The Departed. Willis, Owen, and Wahlberg have all turned in charismatic, intense performances elsewhere, but Fuqua reduces all of them to stoic wooden caricatures, leaving Denzel Washington as the lone standout. Why?

He gets to be the bad guy. Denzel’s character Alonzo is Training Day’s Tyler Durden. He’s an unrepressed, unchecked raw masculine ego. He can shoot, fight, and fuck better than you can, and he won’t think about apologizing for it. By contrast, the inappropriately named Swagger is all furrowed brow and weepy conscience. He’s unafraid to kill when necessary, but there’s nothing enjoyable about it. Stoicism might be a noble ideal, but in Fuqua’s vision, it’s tedious and unenlightening to watch.

The bigger problem with Shooter is that we know the first act of the story before it even begins. Swagger is going to be set up by the Conspiracy, and then he’s going to be on the run. But first, we get to watch him play with his dog, walk around Philadelphia, and squint some more. Since Swagger is a two-dimensional cutout and oddly gullible, watching the setup is an exercise in patience. The Conspiracy, as headed by a rasping Danny Glover, is two ounces of mustache wax away from cartoon villain status. The sniper-speak sounds real, but there’s nothing engaging about it. I’m sure that humidity and wind speed can effect how my toaster works, too, but reading that chapter of the manual with a snarling face is not engaging.

For all the long-range shot heroics, there are few moments with a finger on the trigger. Nowhere does the film really get inside that lonely position of taking someone’s head off from close to a mile away. It should be a lonely, fascinating position of awareness and single-minded purpose. Instead, Shooter is more concerned with a conspiracy so unwieldy that it veers away from plausibility entirely. As a result, it just misfires blindly from chase to chase, hoping that sheer grimness will substitute for excitement. Shadowy forces with an army of mercenaries on the payroll still have to rely on a complicated setup that in the penultimate moment hinges on a two-bit, doughnut eating city cop? If that sounds believable, then let’s have a little chat about the grassy knoll.

Ostensibly, it’s the story of Buddy “Aces” Israel, and the teams of hitmen sent to exterminate him. Get it? His name is “Aces” and the movie is called Smokin’ Aces because people are out to kill him. Get it? Isn’t that clever? Don’t you get it? DANCE AT HOW MOTHERFUCKING CLEVER THAT IS!

Smokin’ Aces feels like the director is shouting at you from the screen, and expecting the audience to confuse belligerence with entertainment. There’s might be more to the story than the tragic saga of Buddy “Aces” Israel, but it’s really hard to give a shit. Call it Grand Theft Auto cinema, but it’s nothing more than Scarface induced mayhem filmed with a years worth of music video clichés. The opening credits are just a pending body count. You know three minutes in that this film isn’t going to get any better, and every actor is just walking through the motions of a character that they’ve done elsewhere.

Most notable is Jeremy Piven, who is directly channeling his sleazy agent from HBO’s Entourage. What works so well in the small screen is left high and dry on the silver screen. Much in the same way that George Lucas hammered dull and lifeless performances out of a stellar cast in his second Star Wars triolgy, Smokin Aces is a case study of how context effects everything. Piven gives almost an identical performance to his Entourage agent, but he’s so out of tune with everything surrounding him that what’s charming in one milieu is gratingly self-indulgent in another.

The complete lack of focus is wearing, and the incessant directorial gimmickry comes off as nervousness. Slow motion, fast motion, excessive profanity and pretend-profound character monologues about soiled calfskin jackets. It’s all noise. Noise without source or purpose, nor is there any appreciable center to the madness. If you’re not going to have a moral center to your story, there absolutely has to be an amoral center, some ghoulish ringleader to lead us through the funhouse. The only constant here is the director’s self-indulgence and short attention span. When the film reluctantly selects a character to survive the carnage, he must then survive the long-winded explanation of what is actually going on, which is nonsensical hash and feels like it’s been crudely stapled on from another movie entirely.

By the halfway point of the film, you can feel even the editor surrendering to the lack of reason. Scenes seem to fall into place randomly, and moderately well composed shots get lingered upon in a token offering of substance. There isn’t a consistency to the pacing anywhere to be found, because none exists. An obvious point of comparison is Ocean’s 11, both the original and the re-make. Each of those films juggled a vast number of characters with an easy choreography.

Not long after drowning any sense of rhythm and leaving it for dead, the film shifts into panic mode. The hyperactivity quotient goes through the roof with short-attention span bursts of desperation. Like the pretentious, ripped from The Wall sequence where a strung out Jeremy Piven contemplates his eyeball in a multitude of mirrors, as if he’s testing for astigmatism.

Or the scene where one character with a sleazy mustache, whom I was fairly certain had been killed off, turns up in a trailer park with three fingers missing. He’s met by a scrawny ten year old nerd with oversized glasses , an eye patch, and a karate uniform, who tries to talk like a gangster and waves a Ritalin-induced erection at the fingerless guy while his grandma tries to shoo him away.

See? It’s funny! Because he’s a nerd! And he’s got an eyepatch! And a boner! And he says “bitch” and “dawg”! And when that alone fails to amuse, or have a point, there’s suddenly a jaunty montage of the boy whipping through his karate poses in hyper-fast motion or super slow motion. The desperation behind the scenes is palpable here as the filmmakers realize their hyper-active 10 year old with an erection isn’t wacky enough, so we better pile on the trick camera moves just to make sure you get the point that it’s wacky!

The entire venture feels bloodlessly machined, as if enough pointless nihilism could be piled up until the whole venture reaches some critical mass of cool. The good news is that sometimes the audience gets it right. The disappointing box office performance should be a sign of optimism, that sometimes the masses can see right though the atonal clanging for attention and give it the cold shoulder that Smokin’ Aces feebly deserves.