A Total Eclipse Of The Heart

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We live in a weird time in which it seems that quite a lot of movie icons are having children that look suspiciously like clones of them. Have you seen Danny DeVito's daughter Lucy? I know this doesn't make any sense, but imagine if Danny DeVito was an attractive young woman and that's pretty much exactly what she looks like. If the internet ever went down and all I had for a power wank was the poster for Batman Returns then thanks to having seen her I reckon I could probably manage. Perhaps the most famous right now though is Scott Eastwood who has spent most of his career being cast as various white boys with the word 'jock' in their character description. He's okay but if his father hadn't made history with a cowboy hat and a cracked scowl then I'm not sure that young Scott would have even managed to crack the film industry as an out of focus extra in a low budget porno. Although if he did then I bet it'd be a porno called A Fistful Of Cock. If somebody had told me that he was a cheap 1960's Clint Eastwood action figure that had been possessed by the soul of Paul Walker then I'd probably believe them. But right now I've just seen a film called Midnight Sun which features Patrick Schwarzenegger, the clone son of Arnold Schwarzenegger and I was excited to see quite how far the apple had fallen from the old Austrian Oaktree. I'm not entirely sure who Patrick Schwarzenegger's mother is, if you're interested, although at this point I suspect that Arnie would probably have to fucking Google it too.

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Midnight Sun tells the story of a young girl with a rare disease that prevents her from leaving the house during daylight. Although, to clarify, it's not simply that's she's a goth. When she said that she was hoping 'the cure' would turn up to help her I spent the first half of the movie assuming she meant the fucking band. If she does go out during the day then we're told that the sun will turn her brain to mush which would admittedly put her on the same intellectual level as Patrick Schwarzenegger's character. She doesn't initially know him but instead spends her life watching him commute past her house like an idiot's remake of Rear Window. He also specifically always skateboards as he passes her because this film was clearly written by people whose only grasp of what 'cool' is comes from the cartoons that they watched in the fucking '90s. I should mention too that the girl lives with her father who has customised the house to prevent it from letting any light in. Although if you threw a few U.V. lights onto the lawn to prevent her from leaving at night time too then you'd essentially have the kind of daughter that Josef Fritzl might nickname 'Jackpot'! Of course, she does venture out of the house at night though where she finds a secluded spot at a quiet train-station to sing and play her guitar at. It's a pretty similar set-up to how Vanilla Ice has been performing since about 1995 I reckon. Yeah. Take that Vanilla Ice!

As fate would have it though, young Schwarzenegger turns up one night and begins to look at her the way his father begins to look at all of his various housemaids when he's about to go into heat. From here, the movie basically becomes a cliched young-adult teen-romance in which the writers appear to have stolen the sunlight thing from Twilight and then asked, “but how can we make it even more boring?” Although considering the colour of the sick girl's hair, I'm not sure that her death by sunlight situation is a medical condition as much as it might just be that she's a fucking ginger. I thought the lead actress Bella Thorne was pretty standard and so I don't really have anything negative to say about her. Although the lip-syncing for her singing scenes were like watching a badly dubbed kung-fu movie from the fucking '70s. However, Patrick Schwarzenegger was really what made this movie so memorable. His father has often found it difficult to deliver lines because English isn't his first language but Patrick is fully American and so I'm not entirely sure his fucking excuse is? There are certain shots in which he looks so much like his father that it's as though they've used that Benjamin Button-style de-ageing technique and then thinned him out a little. But it's worrisome when an actual human suffers from that 'dead behind the eyes' uncanny valley thing too. I actually think that Arnie has developed into a pretty okay actor over the years but here his son delivers lines like a Terminator has been cast in a soap-opera and is reading his lines phonetically after they've been sharpied onto his co-stars fucking head. 

After Patrick's first encounter with Bella at the train station, she panics with shyness and ends up running off without her treasured songbook. When realising this the next day she asks a friend to go and collect it for her and I know what you're thinking... you think it will have been picked up by young Patrick who will have used it to track her down like she's the mother of the future leader of the fucking resistance. Wrong. What actually happens is that the friend does go to the station only to find the young Schwarzenegger currently reading the book whilst still stood in the exact same place that we'd seen him in the night before. The fucker hasn't moved an inch in about twelve hours! What the fuck is going on with that? It's as though his attempt at reading had completely overwhelmed his brain and his body had gone into full shutdown like those goats that fall unconscious when they get frightened. He also seems completely baffled by the fact that he's never seen Bella Thorne's character before which is pretty odd. I couldn't tell you who lives four doors down from me and I've lived here for over twenty fucking years. Why would he think he should know her? The only people who keep tabs on the people in their area are fucking murderers. Not only that but Thorne seems to find being left off this serial killer-esque list of girls in the area quite charming and begins to go out with him. What the fuck is she thinking? He's clearly crazy. A few scenes later and Schwarzenegger suggests that the two of them go on a little boat ride together. If this was real life then that boat ride would have ended with him kicking her out towards the horizon as the sun comes up and he masturbates over his ability to play fucking God. 

Midnight Sun is so desperate in its attempts to make you cry though that it tries every trick in the 'cheap manipulation of an audience' book to do it. I'd say I'm pretty jaded to this kind of thing because of how obvious it is, however when I saw this film at the cinema there was one woman who began to have a full blown mental breakdown during the final half-hour. She had about nine kids with her and even they didn't seem to fall for the way that the film was cynically using an illness to tell a cheesy story about an unconvincing romance. At the point that I was starting to wonder if I should get the crying lady a tin foil blanket and a cup of tea, one of her children sat the furthest from her stood up, climbed over all of its siblings and went to give her a hug. Or at least that's what I thought was happening. But actually the kid just leaned down to steal the woman's chocolate bar and drink before returning back to its own fucking seat. I can only therefore assume that the woman was simply crying over her own shit life having raised a thieving hive of brats because the film was an actual piece of shit. Bella Thorne's characters name is actually Katie Price who UK audiences will know as being the real name of the ex-super-model Jordan. I know it's not my place to pass comment on another person's physical appearance either but Jordan basically looks like a Barbie crossed with that Elephants Foot thing oozing in fucking Chernobyl. If you don't know who Jordan is then I'd avoid Googling her as she once had a porno tape leak that was like watching a cheap training video for wannabe butchers. But if there's one positive thing I can say about Midnight Sun it's that it's now officially the Katie Price film that's caused me to be the least sick in my own fucking mouth. Thanks for reading, motherfuckers, and see you next time.