Joke In Your Town

• The Monologue:
• I can't top this with any other joke. The greatest newspaper correction of all time.
• Random Pop Culture:
• It's Wednesday night and that means the next two episodes of Steven Seagal, Lawman! Tonight we learned that Seagal enjoys training attack dogs and letting them go to work on defenseless targets (quote of the night: "Those dogs can smell any amount of drugs in the middle of a bag of doggie treats."). Also, he has a blues band in which he plays lead guitar and sings. He is an amazing person. If he were to come face-to-face with Gozer the Gozerian, he wouldn't have to lie to save his life because he is actually a god.
• Seriously, the show is great. I actually like how they focus on a different theme each episode. It makes for a nice flow between the ride-along footage and the parts about his life.
• The producers of 90210 made a very good decision when they dumped Ethan at the end of last season, made Liam a regular, and replaced Ethan with Teddy. Also, the end of this week's episode -- the cliffhanger for the winter hiatus -- was killer. Just when you thought they were going to annoyingly forget that Annie killed someone last year, they brought it back in a shocking way.
• Random Movie Scene:
• The movie in question missed being in this decade by six weeks or so, but today being the actor in question's fifty-sixth birthday, I think this is appropriate.

And They Are Indisputable

These are the facts:

• Tiger Woods jokes are getting difficult, mostly because they are too easy and too dirty. I found myself sitting at work today and opening my mouth to blurt something out before thankfully stopping myself.
• Peter Gammons leaves ESPN for MLB Network. As if I needed one more reason to watch MLB Tonight over Baseball Tonight. It's already the best sports studio show on TV, now it has an embarrassment of riches.
• I was looking at Yahoo's main page and caught this. Wow. They fixed it soon after.
• As The World Turns was cancelled after being on for 54 years. Shoot, Michael Jackson only made it 50 before he was cancelled.
• The finale of The Biggest Loser was on tonight. It's one of the more underrated unintentionally funny shows of any year. The live finale is always really, really disorganized.
• The best TV show of the '00s is obvious, but how big do I make the lists for both TV and movies? Five or ten seem too small. And do I lump it all together, TV-wise -- drama, comedy, reality? I think I may.

Don't Need To Discuss Much

I'm fairly disgusted with the way the Ravens crapped the bed so I have nothing I feel like saying. Heard this song today and, not only is it an all-time great, but I'm ready for my breakup with the 2009 season.

Stuff

Random babbles from the day:

• The finales of The Amazing Race and Survivor are always so much more fun than the finale of American Idol. I think one reason is that we know the contestants better because we haven't only been seeing them at their most made up -- one big reason why Idol fails when it doesn't focus on Hollywood Week as much -- and another reason is that the Idol finale is always way too long and often very boring. The other shows just get down to it. So tonight's Race finale wasn't that surprising and it was very quick, but it was just fun.
• And a whole other kind of fun is John Lithgow at his psychotic best in Dexter. The end of tonight's episode, the penultimate of the season, was delightful. I can come up with a number of big stars that play the psycho well (Depp, Pitt, Nicholson), but Lithgow is pretty underrated when it comes to that.
• Last night, I watched the pilot episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, because I have heard lots of good things and wanted to see for myself. I watched almost the entire first season by this morning. Wow. Not only is it a different kind of funny than any other show I watch, but it's the kind of funny I would write if I were so blessed.
• I also discovered that the second season of Discovery's Everest series is now available on Netflix Watch Instantly. The first season is amazing and the second is looking pretty good so far, too.
• I don't know how anyone in the NFC beats the Saints. Brees looks like crap today and still manages 400+ yards and a comeback win. Lucky, sure. But as he said in the post-game press conference, why shouldn't New Orleans deserve some luck?
• And in the AFC? Assuming the Colts' potential defensive backfields issues show up in the playoffs, I don't know who comes out of there. It really looks like either them or San Diego.
• It's been the case the last few years that the loser of the Super Bowl does not make the playoffs the next year. The last defending champion to not make it was the Patriots, in 2002. Looking like a switch-up: the Cardinals are in and the Steelers are now most likely out. Maybe the refs should have given Warner that last chance last year and he would have pulled off the win?
• Going to be in New York again all next week. Think I'll come up with the beginnings of my "best of" lists this week so I can start running them.

Worst of the Worst: #59, 88 Minutes

There's much to be made of Al Pacino's decline from his heights as the understated, controlled Michael Corleone of The Godfather to the screaming, overacting laughing-stock he's become now. With every new performance, the critics gush about how awful the movie is and we laugh at what a caricature the man has become. Maybe it's time to stop laughing and start lamenting. We're talking about a man once considered one of the greatest actors of all time. His current state hasn't made his older performances seem worse, but it does make me sad when I watch, say, Dog Day Afternoon. It makes me never want to watch a newer Al Pacino movie again. Indeed, in 88 Minutes, #59 on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the worst movies of the decade, even Pacino himself looks like he's tired of this crap.

Sure, he screams with his overdone accent that he seems to have developed around the time of Scent of a Woman, but he does it with no flair. He just looks tired. The bad hair he has in the film is more enthralling than he is. In one scene, Alicia Witt acts circles around him, so much so that the scene fails because he can't live up to her performance. It's all depressing and it deadens the entire experience of watching the movie, making it seem more mediocre than flat-out bad, until you think hard about what the movie has to offer beyond Pacino and all that he brings.

88 Minutes is about a forensic psychologist who helps to put a serial rapist-murderer behind bars. The bad guy, protesting that he is innocent, turns to Pacino and says, "Tick tock, doc." Sure enough, nine years later, long after any clock would have run out of batteries, Pacino gets a phone call on the day of the killer's execution. "Tick tock, you have eighty-eight minutes to live." I'm all about real-time thrillers. I love 24, liked Johnny Depp's movie Nick of Time, and feel that using time in that manner lays a foundation of suspense upon which the film maker can build the plot. However, a real-time thriller 88 Minutes is not. I think it means to be, but it jumps four minutes almost immediately and then jumps a bit later on. It never shows you a clock clearly enough for you to do a calculation to figure out when exactly the deadline is in relation to other clocks you see. In fact, the first time it shows you one, it unravels the entire movie with one of the worst continuity decisions I can remember.

Pacino, teaching a class, gets a call that he has eighty-whatever minutes left and looks around to see one of his students playing with their cell phone. He grabs it and asks the student what is going on. The student says that he was just checking the score of the Mariners game (the movie takes place in Seattle) and we see that the Mariners are leading the Yankees 3-1 in the bottom of the first, at Seattle. A couple of minutes later, Pacino looks at a clock to reveal that it is 10:47AM. What? What?!? I had to pause the movie and think about that for a minute. How could anyone choose to include a detail that had the Mariners playing a home game that started at 10AM? Not that the movie had any credibility -- given that it was on this list and that it stars Pacino and was made in the last ten years -- but it immediately made me question every single thing the movie put forward. And when a movie is as poorly constructed as this one, that's not a good thing to have happen.

The real flaw in this movie is that none of the details make sense, just red herring after red herring. The writer continuously introduces new things deep into the story that either don't add to the (lack of) suspense or are laughable. The film tries to throw you for loop after loop as the mystery unfolds but, much like the DVD of this movie, nobody buys it. It becomes a mush of details that nobody would care about, leading to a climax with a horrible continuity error and a misuse of the real-time concept. Although time jumps at a couple of places in the movie, the time at the end actually seems to stretch out longer than it should.

So, as the depression over Pacino's career deadens any hard feelings I have towards this movie, the fact that this review is significantly longer than I originally meant it to be says that 88 Minutes was really bad. You want to know how bad? Just watch from 3:55 to 5:55 of the clip below. You get all of Pacino's bad hair and bad acting that you need from just those two minutes. Who talks into a cell phone like that?



Update: I realized after watching the above clip again that Pacino recaps the entire plot of the movie in that cell phone conversation. That's one way to know a mystery movie is awful; when they feel they have to tell you exactly what happened at the end.

Snowpocalypse

Because it's all about making stupid new words. We're just hours away from Stormageddon.

So Long To Find Out

• The Monologue:
• The Conservative Bible Project wants to publish their own Bible because they say that the common language is too liberal. Some of the changes:
• Jesus will not heal anyone indiscriminately because that's socialism! Instead, he'll only heal those who can afford a small fee and who are not actually sick.
• Jesus doesn't ride a donkey to Jerusalem because only a punk would care that much about the environment. Enter the Holy Hummer!
• Jesus can see Egypt from his house!
• Random Pop Culture:
• After last week's episode, the vote in tonight's Survivor was so sweet. Yet another huge blindside, but the producers let us in on the secret this time so that we could laugh at John and Shambo. The preview for next week looks very promising, but, of course, every episode this season has been tremendous.
• Not the strongest Community, but it had a bunch of funny side jokes, mostly having to do with condoms and STDs. The "thumb in a turtleneck" line was pretty good.
• On the other hand, tonight's 30 Rock was the best of the season to date. They finally got away from the "real America" jokes and back into the behind-the-scenes show business stuff. Best part: the scene when Liz is nervously trying to shoot the opening to Deal Breakers, followed by the jokes about what people look like in HD.
• How many 30 Rock episodes until the "Comcastic" jokes begin? It's coming very soon.
• Anybody else watch any of Jets-Bills? Have you woken up yet? I promise it's over.
• Random Music Video:
• This single was released on December 3, 1965, in the United Kingdom.