Point/less

Tarsem Singh is a director whose filmography draws extremely unfortunate parallels to another Indian-American director who shall remain nameless so I don't ruin this blog any further. Tarsem directed The Cell, a borderline astounding cerebral experience that with a better lead actress would be a timeless classic to get high to and have bizarre paranoid hallucinations with. He followed his good work with The Fall, a movie I don't remember much since I watched it really drunk during the aftermath of a breakup, but the intense primary colors were soothing and Lee Pace was doing something in a circus, it wasn't good but it wasn't terrible. Immortals was his breaking point. He was either going to be a one hit wonder Pepsi commercial director, or a subversive visionary whose effects would dazzle the mind while conveying deep classical thematic elements to a popcorn munching audience that might somehow appreciate it. [Spoilers he's the corn-water guy, not a derivation of Kubrick.]

Why am I talking about Tarsem so much while comparing him with a descent through Shyamalan's filmography? Because I just watched Self/Less, which for some goddamn reason he directed.

First off: no one saw Self/Less (a title so stupid i'm going to stop referring to it soon), and I don't blame you for not understanding what i'm complaining about. Secondly: Self/Less is one of the most blatant ripoffs of Altered Carbon i'm upset that some screenwriter asshole probably never read Richard K. Morgan's noir cyberpunk classic and came up with a derivative shitass product and made almost as much money as Ryan Reynolds off of it from this.

Selfless is a movie that is supposed to be a high-minded action psychological thriller about transhumanism and the concept of a soul and the physical depths of consciousness that our wonderfully complex brain has created. Instead it's a generic 'action' sci-fi shitpiece shot in Louisiana because of blatantly obvious tax credits where a terminally ill Ben Kingsley transfers his mind into Ryan Reynolds and proceeds to fuck a bunch of chicks before realizing the deal he struck with Ozymandias from Watchmen isn't all that he bargained for, also this is basically a Twilight Zone episode but 3x as long.

I could have watched three Twilight Zone's over the course of this piece of shit and those were filmed in the 60's on videotape and contain greater moral/ethical relevance and thematic impact than the horseshit that was packaged into this shitty dvd.

Selfish begins with Ben Kingsley being a Mr. Big so and so real estate developer that profited off 9/11 to build a bunch of buildings for teh 1% and gets cancer in his 60's like i'm supposed to sympathize with him. He then spends a quarter billion dollars on what he thinks is a lab-grown body to transfer his consciousness into which turns out to be Ryan Reynolds who is a soldier that agreed to trade his body for money to save his daughter from some fake made-up illness (For some reason Kingsley is agreeing to transfer his 69-year-old consciousness into a 39-year-old actor instead of some 21yo Adonis clone but w/e, men in hollywood are allowed to remain ageless and sexy forever, not like women who turn into spoiled cottage cheese at 35).

What follows is a pointless hour and 45 minute chase sequence where Kingsley in Reynolds' body winds up having hallucinations outside his billion dollar New Orleans apartment of his former life, seeing that the body he bought wasn't grown but an actual guy, trying to save that old family, getting captured, getting his consciousness fake-overwritten by the Ozymandias bad guy and then killing all of the people in a poorly set-dressed setting draped in plastic dropcloths.

At the end he has the extremely obvious standoff with the bad guy, who turns out to have been the old man that talked about transhumanism in the beginning who wrote his consciousness into Ozymandias' body, and then burns him to death very PG-13ly with a flamethrower. Then Kingsley/Reynolds goes to visit Kingsley's daughter and gives her some stupidass trinket and some money since she hated him when he was still the same guy that won an academy award for acting good a billion years ago, and then *stunning twist* Kingsley stops taking the medication that overrode Reynolds' consciousness and the perfect fucking stupid family is able to reunite in the caribbeans and live a flawless life until climate change eventually devours their island and they drown horribly. Nothing matters.

 

(for extra cheapness: this fucking movie has an act break where Reynolds after fucking up saving his past family and getting them captured by Ozymandias meets his former friend in a diner, called "Huddle House" since apparently this fucking movie was too CHEAP to get either the Denny's logo or goddamn WAFFLE HOUSE which it was obviously filmed in since it's the South)

PS: also, Reynolds wears this stupid fucking raincoat almost the entire movie. what drives me crazy about that is that he uses it like halfway through to disarm and choke out a bad guy by coolly wrapping it around his throat, then runs off. He doesn't pick it up. Then in the final showdown in the stupid fake clone lab BAM same raincoat. Fuck this shit.

P.P.S. Just because Deadpool was fun and mostly not boring I don't forgive Reynolds for all of the cinematic atrocities he's visited upon us. This is not a Matthew McConaughey situation on our hands, it's a guy that fucked up almost constantly then did one right thing then will probably go back to fucking up and making sure his racist wife never has to work again and can keep posting uncomfortable edited instagram pictures