Land of the Lost: and a bitter lamentation on my own lost land of movies.

"Land of the Lost is a seriously deranged movie" - Roger Ebert





It is near the middle of July and there are only four movies in this entire year so far that I can honestly say I liked enough to ever watch again:

1. UP
2. The Hangover
3. The Soloist
4. Land of the Lost



If I have been posting a lot of blogs about movies on here it is simply because I feel nostalgic lately for the time when I could watch a movie and actually enjoy it. I still remember a time when movies were more about imagination than pyrotechnics, when people went to movies to feel something more than just a headache. Back in those heady years of my youth I can even remember going to movies without brand name actors or directors (gasp!). Megan Fox's cleavage had not yet been discovered, but somehow we all got by. Those times are slipping through our fingers, like sands through the proverbial hourglass people! I'm getting pretty depressed about it actually.


I wasn't even planning on watching "Land of the Lost" because I'm not big on Will Ferrell, or remakes of old, old television shows for that matter. But then everyone started telling me about how awful it was. That always catches my attention because people will usually put up with a lot of crap before they start complaining. They always say it was "alright". Or they say something like, "It was well done, and good acting and all, but it just wasn't my thing." Or, even more to my perpleximent, they actually end up liking the filth. One fine example is the new Star Trek which everyone absolutely loves. I love it like I love watching grass grow. It's not really, truly bad, it's just awesomely mediocre and bland, much like everything else. I can't even tell most movies apart any more. So when everyone says they hated, hated, hated Land of the Lost, and proceed to spew venomous bile about how terrible it is, my ears prick up like a Doberman's ears to the sound of a tasty morsel scampering into it's territory.


Even a truly terrible movie is better than the flat, gray, boring tripe like Wolverine, Transformers, Terminator Salvation, Public Enemies, G.I. Joe, Harry Potter, blah, blah, blah. The list goes on and on and the people eat it up like it's going out of style. But then comes "Land of the Lost" and all of a sudden everyone is pissed off. A movie with the power to enrage the hypnotized masses is always promising to a geek like me.


So I headed out to the ghetto flix to check it out, and Roger Ebert was absolutely right. It was seriously deranged in the most hilarious of ways. I would call it a guilty pleasure, except that I don't actually feel guilty for it. I will not apologize for loving every stupid, low-ball, ridiculous, wonderfully absurd, surrealist, scatological minute of it. Here's some snippets from my old pal Roger at the Sun Times, who does know what he's talking about:

"The film involves a gloriously preposterous premise, set in a series of cheerfully fake landscapes.....many jokes about dinosaur manure, dinosaur urine, dinosaur intelligence, dinosaur babies, and dinosaurs' hurt feelings. Also blood-sucking insects, carnivorous trees and the soundtrack from 'A Chorus Line.'....actors make not the slightest effort to appear terrified, amazed or sometimes even mildly concerned. Some might consider that a weakness. I suspect it is more of a deliberate choice, and I say I enjoyed it."





Roger is definitely not very well backed up in his opinion. Metacritic gives it an average rating of 32 out of 100. But I will add my own thumbs up in support of this madness, even if no one else will. It's the best time you are likely to have at a theater without taking your pants off for at least the next month. These are, after all, dark times we live in.


Most of the audience had already left Land of the Lost before the halfway mark. A movie like this requires a special kind of endurance I guess. And at the end the rest of the audience walked out pissing and moaning about wasting two hours of their lives. I was still rolling on the floor in laughter. I like to believe that the humor in this film is simply so stupid that you actually have to be smart to appreciate it. Or maybe I'm just crazy. But even without the cheap, dirty humor I still thought it was a sort of surrealist masterpiece. It must have taken some huge balls for the filmmakers to dare make a movie like this when they could have just made it more awesome like Transformers, and by awesome I actually mean banal.

So, in short: I think We have way too many movies these days that look like this:




...when what we really need is more movies that look like this:





Click Here to read Roger Ebert's cheerfully optimistic take on this most excellent piece of cinema.