Random Babbles

Project Transformers: 13 Going on 30

2011-08-28T21:02:00.001-04:00

Please excuse the short hiatus from watching these movies. I grabbed the first disc of season one of Justified from Netflix and nothing else (besides shows that are airing new episodes right now) graced my TV until I had finished the second season and watched the ending twice. I'm sure I'll go into more detail about the goings-on in Harlan, KY, later, but now back to my journey through my wife's chick flicks and it continues with the 2004 movie, 13 Going on 30.

A nerdy 13-year-old girl in 1987 hates her life and how she is not friends with the popular crowd, constantly wishing that she could be 30 and glamorous like the people in her favorite magazine. After the cool kids destroy her party, leaving her to turn on the only friend she has, she has some sort of glitter fall on her and wakes up as a 30-year-old (Jennifer Garner) in Manhattan in 2004. She learns that she turned into one of the cool people and ditched said only friend when she goes to find him (Mark Ruffalo), also living in Manhattan. She discovers that the nerdy girl was the best girl to be all along and falls in love with the old nerdy friend, yada yada yada. It's difficult to pick the plot apart to some extent (even leaving out my astonishment that Garner only had to get used to cell phone rings and her own boobs, with no mention whatsoever of how the world changed internet-wise from 1987 to 2004), because the movie is essentially a fairy tale and one wouldn't really pick apart the plot of a Disney movie. Having said that (with a nod to Jerry Seinfeld), pick this plot apart is exactly what I'm about to do, because the ending of the movie is BS.

Living happily ever after is all well and good for a fairy tale, but how we get to the "happily ever after" in 13 Going on 30 is so flawed that I've seen Saturday Night Live sketches with more thought put into how they're going to close. Bear with me as I explain, but I refuse to "spoiler alert" a movie from 2004. Ruffalo is getting married to a woman who, by all accounts, is just fine but just not Jennifer Garner. So Garner, having saved her magazine (presumably only to go out of business in five years or so when the internet makes most magazines obsolete) with Ruffalo's help, goes to find him at his wedding (which, frankly, seemed to just pop out of the blue as a plot device, making it the only matrimony ex machina I can ever remember). She expresses her love to him and he is broken up about it because he has always loved her, but he's about to marry this not-so-bad woman. (Aside: the potential for him to leave this perfectly not-so-bad woman to marry the girl of his dreams made me think longingly of Michael Showalter's The Baxter.) He then goes to his closet and takes out the "dream house" that he made for her when they were kids -- from which the magic glitter fell on her in 1987 -- and the glitter falls on her again, upon which she wakes up back in 1987 but just moments before the original glitter fell on her, just in time for her to express her love for Kid Ruffalo and then they are shown living happily ever after. Let's go through the problems with the ending:

Problem #1: She gets back to 1987 right before the original glitter falls on her. By kissing Kid Ruffalo, she averts the glitter from ever falling in the first place. How did she then learn she should kiss him?
Problem #2: In the timeline of the movie, she became popular in high school by befriending the cool kids and then ended up with a great life, lots of money, and a dream job. She worked at the job with the leader of the cool kids, played by Judy Greer (Fun Fact: she was also in 27 Dresses! Yay for Judy Greer's career!). If Kid Garner fell in love with Kid Ruffalo, then presumably she did not sell out to become one of the cool kids. The "happily ever after" part of the movie doesn't say what she does for a living, but I'm guessing she still had the great magazine job. So how did she end up looking exactly the same and happy in the same way, even though her entire high school experience and the entire track of her life changed?

Again, it's a fairy tale, but I'm uncomfortable with this idea that she changed something in her life, but it still continued down the same track for everything but her love life. There's another paradox as well. Where did 30-year-old Jennifer Garner's conscious mind go when 13-year-old Jennifer Garner's mind was in the 30-year-old body? Was it a Quantum Leap situation, where it was hanging out in some room somewhere. Did it jump into the 13-year-old's body, where it was extremely bored because there was no internet in 1987? The only way these paradoxes don't matter is if the whole movie is a dream, but that can't be true because of "Problem #1" above. Like I said, BS.

I should also note here that another release in 2004 was one of the best high school movies ever, Mean Girls. That movie talks about nerds versus cool kids and how, in the end, people just sort of outgrow it. 13 Going on 30 does not subscribe to that theory and that bothered me.

The prime fun in this movie comes from the references to '80s music, keyed by the big "Thriller" dance scene, but even there I found a little annoyance as the edit they used of "Thriller" was not the actual song and, at one point, a character turns on "Ice, Ice, Baby" and the song starts at the beginning of the third verse. Over all the movie is fairly fun, especially because it's impossible to hate Mark Ruffalo, even if he's playing a guy who runs over a kid or a way-too-hippy-ish winery owner who inexplicably attracts a married lesbian. Garner does not do a very good acting job in this movie, but I like her okay too, from her time on Alias or in Juno. So, yes, my anger at the ending aside, I enjoyed this much more than 27 Dresses and generally did not hate it. Even if there's no way in the world that that many people know the "Thriller" dance by heart.

Perfection

2011-08-17T21:52:00.001-04:00

There is no argument that TV is stronger right now than it has ever been. The four best dramas of all time aired in the last ten years. After hitting a major lull after Seinfeld, sitcoms are back and networks, especially NBC, are airing shows that are not purely broad comedy. Most of this quality comes from the rise of original programming on premium cable, which then spread to basic cable, so shows did not have to be as popular to survive because the networks were getting some revenue beyond just advertising and the usual standards and practices of prime time network television did not have to apply. So it's no surprise that the best networks for original programming are on cable, namely HBO, AMC, and FX. HBO had the first two of those aforementioned four greatest dramas of all time, The Sopranos and The Wire.

HBO still has some greatness in Game of Thrones and Curb Your Enthusiasm and Treme, but in pure quality of shows, it may actually be third right now. AMC has great schlock in The Walking Dead and great acting in The Killing. FX has the awesome Sons of Anarchy and Justified (I mean, really awesome) and almost unbelievably great comedies in Archer, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Wilfred. But, more importantly, these two networks have the three best shows on TV. Two are obviously the other two of the four best dramas of all time, Mad Men and Breaking Bad. The third is FX's Louie. Of the three, Louie may be the only honest-to-god perfect one of the bunch.

The broadcast networks don't really have any great dramas -- I don't watch The Good Wife, but Grey's Anatomy is sometimes very good and House used to be sometimes very good. They do have some great comedies -- Parks and Recreation and Community, especially. It's possible even that those two shows are the second and third best comedies on the air, but neither is close to Louie. In fact, the continuum of TVcomedies right now goes something like this:
<Louie-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Parks & Rec-Curb-Community------Everything else->

You can take it from esteemed writers like Chuck Klosterman or Alan Sepinwall, but you really just need to watch it. Louie is sometimes funny and sometimes thought-provoking and sometimes both and sometimes you're just not sure, but it always leaves me shaking my head at how brilliant it is. It's probably the closest I've ever seen to the epitome of "I can't describe greatness, but I know it when I see it." Even more, I know what perfection is every time I watch Louie.

Project Transformers: 27 Dresses

2011-08-14T16:52:00.000-04:00

Once again, an explanation of "Project Transformers" here.

2008's 27 Dresses stars Katherine Heigl as, wait for it, always a bridemaid, never a bride. She has been in twenty-seven wedding parties with twenty-seven dresses to show for it. She loves weddings, but has not yet met the man who can give her her own perfect day. She thinks her boss (Edward Burns) is that man, but he falls in love with her younger sister (Malin Akerman). She resents that and, at the same time, is also being hounded by a wedding writer (James Marsden) who has a thing for her. Will she end up with her dream guy? Will it turn out that the wedding writer is really Mr. Right all along? Do I even have to spoil it for you?

I have to admit that the movie had two strikes against it before I even pressed play. One strike, the more minor of the two, was that there was a grammatical error on the DVD case, where it said that she had been a bridesmaid "no less than twenty-seven times." Fewer. The second, more major, strike was Katherine Heigl. I am not a fan. She wasn't horrible in her first big movie, Knocked Up, but she starred in the despicable The Ugly Truth (the awfulness of that was not all her fault) and, frankly, Izzy Stevens was always my least favorite Seattle Grace doctor (next to, of course, Meredith Grey, whom everyone hates). In her leaving Grey's, Heigl came off as annoying in her remarks to the press and was involved in the worst story arc in a good recent TV drama that did not include members of the Bauer family. The other castmembers are fine. Burns showed up in a few too many of the "Worst of the Worst" movies for my liking, but Akerman can be funny and Marsden wasn't just good in X-Men and X2 but was also fantastic in Hairspray. Judy Greer plays Heigl's best friend, but she seems to take too many roles to only be as awesome as she was in Arrested Development or is in Archer.

The plot is entirely cliched, but there are still a number of confusing moments in the film. For one thing, Heigl works for a company that puts out catalogs, she's being pursued by a writer for a newspaper with a really popular wedding section, and her father has a family-owned hardware store. The movie came out in 2008, but the script was written in 1952? The scene where Burns proposes to Akerman involves a huge sign being unfurled that reads, "Will you marry me?" but she asks what is going on and seems surprised when he gets down on one knee. My favorite is that the end credits begin over the newspaper story of her wedding and there are two weird errors. One, more lazy, is that it refers to Heigl's character as the daughter of "Hal Nichols and Mrs. Nichols" which sounds dumb, especially when you consider her mother died when she was very young and would never be referred to in that way. Second, more funny, is that the article next to the wedding story is written by Marsden's friend (played by an underused Maulik Pauncholy), who is never given a last name in the film and so the story has a by-line of just "Trent."

I went in not wanting to like the movie, but some of the people are likable enough that it wasn't miserable. The jokes fell flat, but romantic comedies are generally not my thing, anyway. It is bad though and I dislike most romantic comedies in that same way that I dislike children movies that studios just spew out with no intention other than making as much money as possible. There is a point in the movie where Heigl's character has just found out Marsden's character is a wedding writer (who has previously said that he hates weddings, but he secretly likes them, it's just that he once had an awful wedding, because he can't just be a guy who doesn't like weddings, he has to be the sweet but wounded guy that needs the right romantic woman to heal him) and she says to him: "You write the most beautiful things. Do you actually believe in love and marriage and just pretend to be a cynic or are you actually a cynic who knows how to spin romantic crap for girls like me?" Hmm. Autobiographical?

Light Our Darkest Hour

2011-08-08T20:45:00.000-04:00

It's time to announce the next movie project. The last one came about by chance, more or less. I happened to have a large chunk of time open up on my weekly schedule with nothing to fill it in the same week that Rotten Tomatoes released their list. I had only seen three. If it had been fifteen or fifty, I don't know that I would have taken on the movies, but I hadn't and I did. I enjoyed having the goal, so with the "Worst of the Worst" finished, I wanted to take on another one. This one is much, much more stupid.

Which is the best movie based on a cartoon based on an action figure? The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie stunk and the cartoon was originally based on a comic book, anyway. The recent G.I. Joe movie was awful. It certainly wasn't Care Bears: The Movie or anything with the Go-Bots. No, it was the non-KMart version of the Go-Bots (clip from Clerks II not available on-line), the Transformers. And it wasn't the Michael Bay crapfest, of course. We're talking about the 1986 cartoon, complete with one curse word and the voice talents of Orson Welles, Leonard Nimoy, and Robert Stack. Yes, it was Orson Welles' last movie. I've seen it a dozen times, at least. I think I saw it multiple times in the theater and they showed it on TV as part of the show and I owned at least one copy of it on VHS. In 2006, a special edition was released on DVD and I bought it.

And found out my wife had never seen it.

I was perplexed and horrified. Somehow, she had never seen this seminal movie of my childhood. I had to set that straight, so I insisted she watch the movie with me, but she refused. She claimed that I make her watch everything I like and rarely watch stuff she likes (and I type this sentence while the TV is showing True Blood, which I don't get at all). She told me that the only way she would ever watch the great Transformers: The Movie is if I watched every one of her DVDs that I had not seen. It's only eleven, not anywhere close to the ninety-seven I watched for the last project, and they're not all bad movies. So it will take me much less time than the twenty-two months the last list took me -- it also helps that I have all of the DVDs and don't have to rely on sending them back and forth to Netflix -- but I am still not super-excited about watching these. Eleven movies and I made no promises to my wife that I would not completely savage them, so I expect to do just that. Hope you enjoy it more than I do, which I won't, probably.

The list:

Worst of the Worst: Post-Mortem

2011-08-06T15:58:00.000-04:00

Now that the quest to watch Rotten Tomatoes' worst-reviewed 100 movies of the decade is over, some wrap-up.

Since this was a list of the worst-reviewed movies, as determined by the films' percentage on the Tomatometer, it's not anything that I decided. There were movies that, after watching them, I didn't think were among the worst movies I had seen recently. Similarly, there were movies not on the list that I would have included, given the chance. The two movies that come to mind immediately are Year One (about as funny as any of the Epic Movie-type movies, but after much higher expectations) and The Ugly Truth (just an abominable, stupid film). I'd listen to arguments on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The three movies I'd take out are Ben Affleck's Surviving Christmas, the Toby Keith vehicle Broken Bridges, and the slightly-funny Boat Trip. Surviving Christmas is the best of the three, making it the "best" movie on this list.

Three acting performances need to called out as being noteworthy in a negative way. There was a lot of bad acting, but some of it was either expected (people in the ___ Movie movies or Larry the Cable Guy or Eddie Griffin) or came in movies that nobody will ever know existed (Fascination). The three I'm pointing out came from known movies or are known actors. First is Max Beesley as the manager/love interest in Glitter. It's not nearly as bad a movie overall as I thought it might be, but he stands out with his bad accent and makes all of his scenes awkward. Second is Chris Klein as the street-wise Interpol agent in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. His overacting needs to be seen to be believed. I strongly suggest anyone who enjoys funny-bad movies watch this movie just for him. Third is, of course, John Travolta in Battlefield Earth. This is a legitimate, talented actor, who puts on a crap performance for the ages. He is as bad in Battlefield Earth as Colin Firth is good in The King's Speech.

On the flip side, you have actors that outperform their movie. A lot of big name people embarrassed themselves on this list, from Barry Levinson to Guy Ritchie to Al Pacino to Ben Stiller to Robert De Niro, but there were some bright spots. I wrote earlier this week about Antonio Banderas in Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, who does so by default. Zoe Saldana is so good in Constellation that she seems like she's overacting because she even gives a damn. Zooey Deschanel is great (and adorable) in The New Guy because, well, she's perfect.

Very soon, I'll be embarking on the next project and will explain the parameters in this space. Until then, we'll leave off with the only three lists that really matter.

5 Worst-Made Movies: This has little to do with entertainment value, but with actual quality of the movie -- the concept, the execution.

5. Dirty Love -- I have never seen a more disgusting movie.
4. Fascination -- A perfect storm of bad acting, bad plot, and even bad music.
3. Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever -- I have seen more coherent YouTube videos.
2. Battlefield Earth -- With the budget that went into it and the controversy that surrounded it, one must tip their cap to a movie this bad.
1. Merci, Docteur Rey! -- It gives messes a bad name.

5 Most Entertaining Movies: They may be bad, but these are the ones I'd suggest someone watch if they felt like checking these movies out.

5. Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever -- I laughed and laughed and laughed. If someone attempted to film an abstract concept like schadenfreude, it might come out looking like this one.
4. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li -- Yes, Chris Klein is that gloriously bad. Also, one of the Black Eyed Peas members plays a bad guy, has no lines, and is still somehow bad.
3. House of the Dead -- Uwe Boll intersperses scenes from the original arcade game with the movie, but the original game was 8-Bit or so, so the pixelated frames do not quite match up with the live action. Some of his choices on making the action artistic are so outrageous that they must be rewound and rewatched multiple times.
2. Battlefield Earth -- There are a lot of parts that are funny, but mostly one just has to see this movie to understand how bad it truly is.
1. Bloodrayne -- I've watched it twice. I'd watch it again right now. Michael Madsen's hair by itself would be funny enough to make this a classic, but the gore effects (think the end of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, but not meant to be wacky) are probably the most entertaining thing Boll has ever put on film.

5 Least Entertaining Movies: This is the final and biggest one. If movies are made to be entertainment then a badly-made movie that is entertaining is at least accidentally successful. Those movies that are least entertaining are the worst kind of movie I can think of.

5. Dirty Love -- I didn't even feel bad for Jenny McCarthy. After sitting through this sexist, racist, demeaning movie, I was glad that she had failed at movie-making and would be forced to go on to a career in trying to keep kids from getting medicine.
4. All About Steve -- Sort of an upset because it was so low on the list (#96), but it is uncomfortably bad, especially given the stars (Sandra Bullock, Bradley Cooper, Thomas Haden Church).
3. 3 Strikes -- I still clearly remember how angry I got when I watched this movie, in October of 2009.
2. The Master of Disguise -- I was once with a group of friends and, upon hearing about how bad this movie was, they found the Turtle scene on YouTube and watched it. I warned them against it. They watched it and then turned to me with sick looks on their faces. I warned them.
1. Merci, Docteur Rey! -- I have nothing to say. I'd prefer to forget I ever watched it.

Worst of the Worst: #1, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

2011-07-31T16:28:00.002-04:00

And so we come to the end of the journey, 647 days after I first saw Rotten Tomatoes' "Worst of the Worst" list and 643 days after I watched the first movie, A Sound of Thunder. We'll get to a post-mortem on the quest in a couple of days, but first, there's one more movie: the single worst-reviewed movie of 2000-09, according to Rotten Tomatoes, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever is a movie about a person named Ecks fighting a person named Sever. Okay, not really. They barely actually fight. This confused me because I proclaimed loudly as the movie began that, as the movie subtitled "Ecks vs. Sever," there was no way that Ecks and Sever would ever join forces to fight against a common enemy, especially since both are played by the two biggest stars (by far) in the movie. Alas, Ecks and Sever only nominally fight, in that Ecks fires like two of the approximately one google bullets fired during the movie at Sever at one point. I suppose Ballistic: Ecks and Sever vs. Evil Rich Guy would be a stupid title.

Lucy Liu is Sever (no first name), a super agent for an American defense agency, who is really good at shooting people and then beating them up by kicking really close to their face, but never quite connecting, even though they fly backwards. Antonio Banderas is Jeremiah Ecks, though he is consistently referred to in the second half of the movie as Jeremy Ecks, a super agent for the FBI, who we are told is really good at shooting people, but he doesn't really fight all that much in the movie because Banderas isn't as good as an actor at martial arts as Liu is, I think. Notice that both are American agents, yet everything happens in Vancouver and nobody cares. Everyone else in the movie is there to be shot, beat up, or both, except for Ecks' wife and her son. We learn that Ecks thinks his wife is dead, but she's married to the bad guy, but then she just goes right back to Ecks anyway in a scene involving dolphins swimming behind a darkened room. The dialogue in that scene -- and all scenes -- is delivered at a whisper. I thought that the Netflix stream was messed up, but it wasn't; I had to turn the TV way up to hear the speaking, but the explosions were at regular volume, so my ears went from bleeding from the loud explosions to hurting from straining to hear the actors speaking. I can only assume they whispered to make the many, many, many explosions sound that much louder.

So, yes, there are explosions every two minutes, there is a series of events that is called a "plot," there are words put together that are called "dialogue." There is even a long fight scene at the end between Lucy Liu and Ray Park, two accomplished martial arts actors, in which they barely touch each other, are lit badly, and the director's insistence on cutting between shots every three seconds leads to no continuity of the action. Of course, that no continuity is right in line with everything else in the movie, so I guess it works. All of this combines to make a real head-shaker of a movie. All of the choices made with the movie (assuming someone was actually thinking about this purposefully), from the story to the editing to the acting to the sound to the camera work and so on, combine in a way in which one can understand why this would stand atop the heap as the #1 worst movie of the decade.

But...

It's just not that bad. It's bad, absolutely, but it's not #1 bad, for two reasons. One, Banderas is just a good freaking actor. He has nothing to work with here, but he has such screen presence that he makes it so that not every second is awful. He's delivering crappy lines to bad actors, but he's delivering them in a way that makes sense. Also, I tried to envision some of the lines as coming from Puss in Boots, and that helped. Two, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever is hilarious. I've written about how some of the movies on this list are painful to watch, but that's just not true of this one. It is a mess in such a way that I was laughing out loud for most of the movie. The goofs in the stunts where it is clear that nobody is actually touching anyone else during fights. The moment where a guy gets shot and everyone runs to put pressure on his chest, but you never see a bullet hole or any blood (and later find out that he's totally fine because the bullet missed his heart by one centimeter). The constant explosions that led to the $70 million budget (it made less than $20 million at the box office). I particularly enjoyed watching the guy who played Curtis on '24' in every scene he was in; he perpetually looked either confused at the direction or angry to be in the movie.

Ballistic is about as poorly-made as any big-budget movie I've ever seen, but the fact that it made me laugh means that it was at least a little bit entertaining, even if it wasn't in the way the film makers had planned. Movies that are made poorly are one way to decide what is "worst," but I think the best way is that entertainment value. If you really get nothing out of a movie, it's worse than a movie from which you get even a little bit. So Epic Movie or Meet The Spartans, which were a big zero on the entertainment scale? 3 Strikes or Master of Disguise or Merci, Docteur Rey!, which were net-negatives in terms of how they made me feel? All are worse than a movie that made me laugh. If this film were a spoof of a no-plot, all-action movie, trying to be bad, it would actually succeed in ways that any number of SNL action-spoof movies have not. Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever may very well be the worst put-together movie I've ever seen, but it's not the worst movie, and not even that close to it.

Worst of the Worst: #15, Alone In The Dark

2011-07-30T18:47:00.000-04:00

The ninety-ninth and penultimate movie I have to watch on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the worst-reviewed movies from 2000-09 is one I was saving. I had intended to watch it for months, but I knew I'd be disappointed if I watched it too early in the process. There are movies on the list that fit into certain categories and I tried to deal with those categories in kind. So, the ____ Movie category (Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, et al)? I tried to get that the hell out of the way as quickly as possible. Ditto, any period dramas. I waited quite a bit longer with the three Larry the Cable Guy movies before I could steel myself. But, from the second I watched Bloodrayne (the only movie that I've watched twice so far), all I wanted to do was watch Uwe Boll movies. The controversial German auteur had four films on the list and they are glorious. He has so little care for the quality of his movies -- for good reason in some cases -- that the viewer must simply sit back and laugh and laugh and laugh. All are ultra-violent with little plot and inane dialogue. Most of his movies -- and all that were on the list -- are based on video games, which is already a wasteland genre for cinema. So, I saw Bloodrayne and loved it and House of the Dead and kept rewinding scenes because they were so funny-bad and In The Name of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale and thrilled to the bad music and worse casting. And I wanted to watch Alone In The Dark so, so badly, but I didn't. I wanted more of Dr. Boll's brand of genius to look forward to. After all that, the verdict: Alone In The Dark is disappointing.

I don't doubt that it's the worst of the four movies on the list. Mostly, it's just really boring. So much of the movie is so dark -- the monsters in the movie are hurt by sunlight, even though they inexplicably come out into the sunlight at the end -- that you don't get the graphic gore of Boll's other movies. What little plot there is is so confusing that the movie starts with a ninety-second scroll/narration to explain the story, setting a sleep-inducing tone. Tara Reid is so bad that Boll excised her scenes from the director's cut, but she's bad in a "Well, yeah, it's Tara Reid, so who cares," sort of way. The dialogue is all exposition, so it's less funny bad than tune-out bad. Everything in the movie screams, "Yawn."

There are some funny moments. At one point, a soldier falls into a pit and the rest of the team searches for him by calling out his name, which was -- wait for it -- Marco. I have never before prayed so hard for Joel Hodgson or Mike Nelson and crew to be with me when I was watching a movie, because it ended up sounding lame when I called back, "Polo!" The CGI is Ray-Harryhausen-technology-esque. The movie has a load of obvious continuity errors and one famed goof, when one of the soldiers is killed but as the camera focuses on her body she lifts her head up right before the scene cuts. It's not a total loss -- it is, after all, an Uwe Boll movie -- but it is mostly forgettable, which Bloodrayne, for instance, is most definitely not. I freaking love Bloodrayne.

I'm still happy that I saved Alone In The Dark, because I am so fascinated by Dr. Boll and his films. It was much more enjoyable than the #2 movie on the list, which I watched a couple of days ago. I also don't intend to stop watching bad movies forever when the list is finished and that especially goes for Boll's oeuvre. The list, however, will be finished soon. Stay tuned, tomorrow, same bad time, same bad channel. Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.

Worst of the Worst: #2, One Missed Call

2011-07-26T23:26:00.000-04:00

I'm not a fan of horror movies. In some cases, it's because I just can't take them. Case in point, I've never been able to watch The Exorcist all the way through, even after reading the book. In most cases, it's because horror movies tend to be pretty poorly made. The makers think the shocks will make up for skimping elsewhere. Case in point, Saw, through which I laughed and laughed and laughed because of the bad filmmaking. I do like some horror movies and those tend to be the ones that are better made, but not too scary. Sort of "horror lite." The ultimates are, of course, John Carpenter's brilliant Halloween and the Spielberg-driven Poltergeist, but when it comes to more recent movies, I'm looking at The Sixth Sense, The Ring, and Final Destination.

The greatness of The Sixth Sense goes without saying; it's less a horror movie than a great movie that is based in the supernatural. Final Destination is just fun. The first one is well-made (the others are crappy, but hilarious) with the right amount of character development to make you actually care if something happens. Also, the first twenty minutes or so are plain riveting. The Ring is a touch scarier, but still has solid acting and an interesting plot. I remember watching that and having my phone ring in the middle. If my wife, calling me, knew any better she could have whispered, "Seven days," and I'd have run screaming out of the apartment. The Ring is based on a Japanese movie and its success meant that more American remakes of "J-Horror" films would be coming. Hence, we have the 2008 remake of the 2004 Japanese film, One Missed Call.

Let's review. Final Destination has elaborate, visually impressive death sequences and worthwhile characters. The Ring has a creepy premise, good acting, and some decent scares. One Missed Call is remarkable because it does its best to be Final Destination meets The Ring, yet it has not one of those things that either movie has. There is no redeeming quality in One Missed Call and there are no scares. It is so minimalist in what it brings to the cinematic table that its eighty-six minutes of run-time seem somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty-six minutes too long. It is a movie that is neither scary nor funny with a weak premise, no character development, and a lazy ending. In other words, it has all the charm of an eighty-six minute Saturday Night Live sketch.

There are a bunch of students at the psych ward of a medical school. I think that's what they were supposed to be. One by one, their phone rings with a weird tone and they never pick it up in time. When they look at their phone, it says, "1 Missed Call," and has a date and time in the future. When they listen to the message left, it has their voice right at the time of their death. Then, at the appointed times, they say the same thing as on the message and either fall in front of a train or get impaled on a girder or get strangled to death by a demon (I think, that scene was confusing). Ed Burns is the streetwise detective whose sister was the first victim of the phone calls and when our main character, one of the girls, tries to find out what's going on before she's killed, he helps her. The cops tell her that nobody had any messages on their phones, but somehow Ed Burns has done research and figures out where the call to his sister was coming from. They use it to track down the family that had a kid that died who is haunting the phones, blah blah blah, but it makes no sense because the kid had a cell phone that was too big for her being so young and how could Burns track down a cell phone to the foster home for the sister of the dead kid who owned the phone.

The plot makes no sense, but it's not helped by insulting dialogue delivered by actors who don't give a crap. It's also not helped because we jump right into the phone calls and deaths and therefore don't know who any of the characters are and, therefore, really just don't care about anything. Girl falls in front of train? People die all over the world all the time, kid, so I can't work up the sympathy. I can feel bad for Sonny Corleone when he's in the tollbooth because I know who he is. You, guy who was in one scene and died in a ridiculous fashion that tried to be Final Destination but fell way short? Meh. The dialogue is so lame and the acting so bad that the entire movie feels like what I've been told the acting parts of porn are like by people who have seen those sorts of movies.

The sorts of movies I like to watch do not generally include spirits -- even those created by special effects that look like they were written in Basic -- or hauntings. I'll take a comedy or a war movie or mob movie. You can keep your possessed cell phones and your nanny cam teddy bears that are supposed to be creepy, but not nearly as creepy as a really creepy teddy bear.

Two left and they're both at home. One I've been saving for pure enjoyment, the last Uwe Boll movie. The other is the #1 worst movie of 2000-09, according to Rotten Tomatoes. It's just a matter of days.

Worst of the Worst: #63, Yours, Mine & Ours

2011-07-24T20:14:00.000-04:00

This being the remake of the 1968 Henry Fonda-Lucille Ball film, this time starring Dennis Quaid and Rene Russo, two likeable stars. Quaid is a widower with eight children. Russo is a widow with ten children. They were high school sweethearts and Quaid has moved back to their hometown to become head of the Coast Guard Academy. Yes, Quaid is military and by-the-book, while Russo is a disorganized wild child. Will they ever fall in love? They do, and quickly. They decide to become a family, but the kids have other ideas and band together to sabotage the relationship. I gather from a close analysis of the IMDB plot synopsis that this differs from the original, where the kids just had trouble getting together.

I'm betting that, unlike this modern one, the original is not just a mashup of as many slapstick jokes as can be fit into eighty-seven minutes, with Quaid ending up with his face in goo multiple times and kids either having a paint fight or hanging out of a window every other scene. Quaid and Russo are not easily hateable, but the kids are so annoying and the realization the kids come to towards the end is so lazy that they completely overshadow the passable leads. Sort of like, say, if it were Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt?

Yours, Mine & Ours may be nominally a remake of a 1968 movie, but I didn't like it the first time when it was called Cheaper By The Dozen.

Worst of the Worst (with Introduction "Why Bad Movies"): #47, Soul Survivors

2011-07-13T21:30:00.000-04:00

Introduction: "Why Bad Movies"

On September 29, 2009, the movie website Rotten Tomatoes released their list of the one hundred worst-reviewed movies of the decade. I was shocked to learn that I had only seen three of them. Considering myself a connoisseur of bad cinema (and with some extra time on my hands because of a change to my regular week's schedule), I charged myself with the sacred quest of watching the other ninety-seven movies on that list. We're now nearly twenty-two months later and I am onto the final five movies I need to complete the list. In that span of time, the response I most get when I speak of the list is an incredulous question: "Why would you waste your time doing that?"

When I say I'm a connoisseur of bad movies, I don't mean to say I have bad taste. I mean that I enjoy seeing where something went wrong or how bad something can go. There can be a fine line between greatness and awfulness, probably finer than between greatness and mediocrity because awfulness can come from someone really going for the gusto and missing badly, whereas mediocrity just comes from no real effort whatsoever. Take two comedies. Anchorman is unquestionably a good movie. The Goods is unquestionably a bad movie. Seeing where Anchorman went right and The Goods went wrong (better ensemble, tighter writing, more original jokes, to name a few things) makes me appreciate the former because of the pitfalls it dodged to become great. You can only really appreciate what it's like to feel good about something because you know what it's like to feel bad about something. There is also no small amount of schadenfreude in seeing a team of filmmakers really, really screw up. Train wreck cinema.

I think it's not that I'm watching bad movies that raises the "why" question, but that I purposefully set out to do it. People watch bad movies all the time. How many people went to see the last two Transformers movies? People watch whatever crap comes on whatever TV station they happen to be flipping by, or they go to the theater and see the next thing that's showing, or they go see what everyone else seems to be seeing. People watch bad movies all the time for two reasons: apathy and ignorance. They either don't care what they are going to watch or they don't do any research and go in blind. When watching a movie -- especially if I'm paying in the theater -- I couldn't live with either apathy and ignorance. I have to know what I'm getting myself into. That's not to say that I really knew what I was getting into when I started on the list; my taste in bad movies runs to the "funny bad" side of things and a precious few of these movies fit that bill. But if you had to watch a hundred so-so movies to get to The Godfather and four great comedies, you'd do it. Battlefield Earth and the four Uwe Boll movies make the whole endeavor worthwhile.

People waste time constantly. I find it fairly self-deceiving when someone says, "I don't have two minutes to do X," because they probably wasted two minutes doing something else, but want to feel busy. I'm insulted when someone says, "You must have a lot of time on your hands," because everyone has the same amount of time on their hands as everyone else; it's all about what you decide to do with it. I've decided to not just play with my baby daughter and read and run and watch TV and play fantasy baseball; I've decided to take ninety minutes to two hours out of every week or so for the last two years to complete a goal that I had set for myself. My question isn't, "Why did I do this?" It's, "What do I do next?"

***

Two of the most controversial (critique-wise) plots of TV shows in the last decade or so were both in the final season of great shows: the Kevin Finnerty sequence of The Sopranos and the Sideways world in Lost. Both are so controversial because, as sequences that were disparate from the actual goings-on of the shows' world, one could easily dismiss anything that happened as meaningless or unearned. In the case of The Sopranos, you knew all along that it was not "reality" (and, granted, the show had used many dream sequences before). In the case of Lost, you had no freaking idea what was going on. In both cases, what happened in those sequences had no real bearing on the resolution of the "real" story line; less so in Lost, but that's an argument for another time. All this is to say that when people decide to buy into the "reality" of a story, they feel cheated if it turns out that the whole thing wasn't ever "real" at all.

Soul Survivors has a surprisingly good cast for a movie you've never heard of, including the underrated (and he's not bad here) Casey Affleck and Wes Bentley (who somehow has turned a smallish part in a great movie into being considered a respectable actor). And that's where the good ends. The movie is supposed to be horror, but tries to pass off weird as scary. The movie is supposed to be edgy, but tries to pass off weird as edgy. The movie is supposed to be weird, but ends up passing off boring as weird.

The opening sequence has a blond girl being murdered by a guy in a mask. Another blond girl then goes to her first weekend at college. She loves her boyfriend but is still friends with her ex-boyfriend. She goes to a party where the guy in the mask who murdered the first blond girl accosts her. She throws him off, drinks too much, gets behind the wheel, and crashes into a car with the guy in the mask, throwing her into a ravine and killing her boyfriend. She's overcome with guilt, but soon is visited by her boyfriend's ghost who is trying to save her from some supernatural demonic forces (read: guy in the mask, who randomly appears here and there) that are trying to kill her. She is also helped by a priest, played stoically by Luke Wilson. Yes, I realize that I do not know how to install a laugh track on a website for just that sort of line. There's a twist involving Luke Wilson's character that you can see coming a mile away and a bigger twist at the end of the movie when (my general rule is not to "spoiler alert" this movies, because I know nobody is going to watch them) it turns out the whole thing was a dream while she was in a coma and fighting for her life after the accident.

It's actually an interesting premise for a movie and the concept saved me from really savaging the film, because it is awful. But the dream sequence also made the entire rest of the movie meaningless because there was never any clue that anything wasn't actually happening to the main character. In fact, the whole idea of the dream sequence where the guy in the mask is trying to kill her makes your brain hurt when thinking about the opening sequence, because there's no reason that guy would kill someone else. It's an entire movie made for that "gotcha" moment at the end, which I figured out too early. Sure, people might say that's what Shyamalan does, but his twist never discounts the rest of the movie, it just makes you see it in a different light. Being as critical as possible, The Usual Suspects has that kind of twist, but it a) is not a dream and b) was made with such great quality that the whole ride is enjoyable, even if you have already seen it. It's okay to be cute, but you simultaneously have to be great to have your main story stand out on its own. The Usual Suspects did it. The Sopranos did it. Lost did it. But that's probably why none of us have ever heard of Soul Survivors.

Four more to go.

Rewatch: 'The Social Network'

2011-07-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

The Social Network is the perfect storm of a movie that desperately wants to be cool with accolades heaped upon it by a lot of people that desperately want to be cool. "Oh, it's about the Facebook? I've heard of the Facebook! The kids like the Facebook!" It walks away with three Oscars: Best Score (deservedly), Best Editing (not nearly as good as Inception), Best Adapted Screenplay (not a strong category for the year, but a few lines of great dialogue don't make it better written than Toy Story 3). It's not a bad movie; far from it, it's a very good movie. It's just not the great movie that many people tried to make it out to be.

There's an interesting plot with personal intrigue. The plot drives the pacing, which is mostly breakneck, reminiscent in some way of All The President's Men. There is one excellent acting performance, two very good ones, and one uneven one. Respectively, that would be Eisenberg, Garfield and Hammer, and Timberlake. The acting in All The President's Men is what makes it a great movie, but it's not the lack of great acting that knocks The Social Network down. It is that Academy Award-winning writing. There is some fantastic dialogue in spurts, but it is Sorkin's preachiness about the internet age that, in part, shows the movie to not be as cool as it wants to be. In a key scene, Zuckerberg confronts his ex-girlfriend in a bar right after he has become famous. She rants about how what's wrong with kids today is that they think they can put everything on the internet as if people care and that, once out there, nothing can be taken back. Sorkin may as well have just shown up in more than just his one cameo and said that himself. Not only would that type of character not have delivered that sort of speech in real life, but it turns into a "get off my lawn" moment in a movie that's supposed to be about kids stomping all over the world's damn lawn.

Fincher goes a little crazy with some vanity shots of crew racing that don't quite work to push the flow of the movie along (hence, my preference for the editing in Inception), but it is the ending that hurts the pace the most for me. I grant that there was no clear ending to the story and so they had to build the frame story of the lawsuit that was not in the book. Once again, though, there is a voice that seems outside the natural story in Rashida Jones' character. She takes a shine to Zuckerberg in a way that is not earned. In the end, she says that Zuckerberg is not an a**hole, even though he tries to act like one. There is a scene, maybe two, where he seems to be softer than his exterior, but that is very fleeting. He only cares about Facebook and maybe that doesn't make him an a**hole, but it certainly does not make him not one.

The movie is beautiful, visually. There are some flashes of brilliance in the dialogue. Eisenberg finished the ascent he began in Zombieland from Michael Cera wannabe to leading man. It's a very good movie, worthy of the Best Picture nomination, particularly when there were ten nominees. Sorkin and Fincher just don't get exactly the perfect feel for a movie about something as modern and pervasive -- and maybe even culture-changing -- as Facebook. The movie speaks to how people who don't use the technology see the technology and that's why those people liked it so much.

An Uncanny Attempt At Importance

2011-06-27T20:08:00.000-04:00

I've now seen the three comic book movies that have so far been released this summer and, of the three, X-Men: First Class is the most entertaining (I rank Green Lantern second and Thor third). There is a lot to look to for X-Men's quality: the lead performances by James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are very good; the movie doesn't bog down in exposition like so many others; some of the special effects, particularly the power of the evil mutant Azazel, are not as fake-looking as everything in Thor. It's a fun movie and that should be enough for a lot of movies, especially anything that comes out between Memorial Day and Labor Day. X-Men: First Class strives to be a bit more than just fun and its failure to do so makes it effectually worse than even Thor (can you tell I didn't like it?) when looked at on any level above pure escapism.

In his essay collection, Eating the Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman discusses advertising strategy in a Mad Men world. He argues that we as viewers grasp the perfection of Don Draper's Kodak speech in the first season because we understand that advertising is not selling us a product, but rather our feelings about a product. That may not be something that people understood fifty years ago, but we buy something because we understand what intangibles a brand is selling and we want to be associated with that brand (his actual example in the book is Obama and Pepsi). I argue that we don't look for not-so-hidden themes in advertising, but in everything we watch. Maybe it's the advertising that conditioned us to do this, maybe it's the other way around, but it's why people immediately jumped at Avatar and its anti-imperialism message. Yes, that notion could not have been any more clear in that movie, but neither could the Lost Cause mythology have been any more clear in Gone With The Wind and it's only recently that I hear people discussing that.

We look for the hidden meaning in things that we watch and those who make what we watch know it. Again, this is most clear in advertising because it is usually something we are watching for free and they try to provide impetus for us to act, but it is of course true in movies or television. Cameron wanted us to think about the War in Iraq when he made Avatar, just like Lucas did in the Star Wars prequels. Similarly, a movie can be made devoid of hidden meaning so that viewers are encouraged to enjoy it only at face value (prime example: Gladiator). Movie makers have been doing this for a long time, to be sure, but the major discourse of these themes had been the purview of critics until blogs democratized that flow of thought. People like to deconstruct what they watch and so it is no coincidence when a movie tries to reveal a theme to make itself more interesting than it may be at face value. Enter: X-Men: First Class.

A mild spoiler warning for what comes after the jump.

The themes within the X-Men franchise have been apparent since it began as a comic book. There are people who are different than us. We, as "normal" society, persecute those who are different. In the case of the X-Men, the differences happen to be pretty awesome and are used to save us from a variety of catastrophes, but we still are scared of the differences and react negatively because of that. That's just inherent in any X-Men story. X-Men: First Class tries to up the ante a bit by working in some more overt references to this inherent civil rights struggle. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an op-ed about the film in the paper of record and I agree with his thoughts on a problem with the movie, but I'm pointing out something different. It's not just that they were tone-deaf on the racial aspects of the movie (they were), but that they tried not to be and tried in a half-assed, wink-wink way.

The movie takes place in 1962, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This time setting allows the movie to use fun costumes and be hip in a British Invasion counterculture sort of way. In fact, a decent amount of the visual qualities made me think of Austin Powers. It allows McAvoy to be flippantly cool as a Brit even though he's playing a decidedly un-flippant, un-cool character in Charles Xavier, and it allows Fassbender as Erik Lensherr (Magneto) to be earnestly anti-Nazi as a Holocaust survivor at a time when real Nazis could be hunted down in Argentina. Setting something fifty years ago is not good enough when you want to be clever in a wink-wink way (it was enough for Hornby in An Education when he was clever in a legitimate way), so they work in a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" joke regarding a mutant hiding in order to speak to modern audiences. They also tried to hit on timeless themes of oppression by having a black character mention slavery and by working in a menorah lighting in one of Lensherr's memories to remind us that he and his mother were pleasantly Jewish until the Nazis snatched them up. No bother that they got the actual mechanics of menorah lighting wrong.

It's these sorts of references that so greatly annoy me. The "we are different and everyone hates us" theme is vocalized later in the film and set up as the overarching theme for the X-Men story. If the writers had left it with just that discussion at the end and the Holocaust at the beginning, we could have drawn a line. Instead, they had to insert these little pieces to, I presume, take our attention away from the fact that it is a rather formulaic movie. It's okay to be a good formulaic comic book movie (see: Iron Man, Spider-Man, Superman II) and it's okay to have a greater message, even in a comic book movie (see: The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 2), but it's only okay to have it both ways if you commit all the way to one or the other. The smartest recent movies and TV shows are those that go all the way: Mad Men and Black Swan take some time to unravel; Louie and The Social Network hide nothing in how frank they are.

X-Men is an entertaining movie, but it wants to be greater than it is. Not everything has to be more than just entertaining on the most basic level. A lot of times -- like yesterday, when I went to see Green Lantern -- that's all I want and I don't suggest that anyone should take any movie at more than face value. The problem is that X-Men wants badly to be taken at more than face value and it attempts to do so, badly.

Worst of the Worst: #16, Daddy Day Camp

2011-06-25T02:30:00.002-04:00

The future rocks. With six of these movies left to go and only the #1 movie (Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever) which I plan to watch last, on Netflix Watch Instantly, I've been trying to find these movies anywhere I can to quicken the process of having to wait for Netflix disk turnover. I regularly search the FIOS TV listings on-line and set my DVR accordingly and, sure enough, Daddy Day Camp was coming on Cartoon Network on Saturday evening. At the same time that I was getting on a plane to go to California. My hope is to finish the list by the end of July, so I didn't love the idea of having to lose ten days or so. But. The plane had satellite television service, which included Cartoon Network. I was reminded of the movie when put the station on to calm a crying baby and was informed that Daddy Day Camp was coming up next. I plugged in my earphones, settled down, and prepared to watch.

Now, it's quite possible that movies seem better than they should on a plane. Since one can assume that a better-than-average movie is, by definition, better than at least half of all movies, there is at least a 50% chance that a movie shown on a plane (or, I suppose, on a TV network carried on a plane) is going to be bad. I've watched Hitch and The Pacifier on a plane. Once, in a show of utter cruelty, a flight even tortured its confined passengers with Batman and Robin. Because there is this real chance that the movie is going to be bad, we may lower our expectations. Anything to get through the next couple of hours without having to talk to anyone, worrying about the sleeping person next to us having their head roll over onto our shoulders, or praying that everyone around us isn't just farting and hiding the sound under the engines.

When it comes to Daddy Day Camp, though, I don't think my expectations could be raised at all. The original Daddy Day Care had its funny moments, but it also starred Eddie Murphy, Jeff Garlin, and Steve Zahn, all capable of being funny. The sequel stars Cuba Gooding, Jr. (Brendan Fraser laughs at his movie choices), a guy who sort of looks like Jeff Garlin, and a guy who doesn't look at all like Steve Zahn. On top of that, it has one of the least original plots to come around since Shakespeare stole all of his work from Francis Bacon and Kit Marlowe. I felt like I needed to mention Shakespeare, Bacon, and Marlowe in this review. The three guys run a camp. It's dilapidated. Only losers go there. There's a camp next door with more resources and a take-no-prisoners owner. If the loser camp doesn't beat the awesome camp in some sort of contrived set of games, the loser camp will fold. I'm pretty sure this story was originally conceived in cave paintings 30,000 years ago. You know it's going to be slapstick. You know Gooding is going to disgrace himself, his family, and his species. You know there is going to be fart and/or poop humor (there's both). You couldn't possibly raise your expectations because this movie has "garbage" written all over it.

Then, something funny happens. The movie lives up to that expectation. It isn't better than you expect, but it isn't worse, either. It is exactly what I expected it to be and that, in some weird way, makes it not that bad. It is exactly what you think it is. It's not going to shock you with its badness, not going to make your jaw drop with its ineptitude. It is what you thought it was. Maybe I was apathetic because I was on a plane, praying that the baby next to me would go to sleep -- praying harder because she was mine -- but I really do think it was just boringly average compared to my expectation and that's just good enough for me not to savage it. And I still like Cuba Gooding, Jr. Somehow.

***

I was inspired to rethink this blog, so coming soon -- perhaps, Sunday -- will be a bit of a reboot. All pop culture, most likely all long-form essays. More promotion in social media. First up: why X-Men: First Class is both an entertaining movie and much more of a failure than the mostly unentertaining Thor.

Broken Record

2011-06-22T23:42:00.003-04:00

Out of town for a bit. I did watch my 95th Worst of the Worst movie over the weekend -- on the plane, no less -- but I'll post the review tomorrow or Friday. Today, instead, I have to marvel in writing a little bit at a realization I had today.

We all know that technology has made certain things obsolete, especially when it comes to personal entertainment. I have a VCR, but I haven't hooked it up for at least three moves. Book stores are suffering because of Amazon and the idea of physical books may suffer even more as e-books become more and more popular. Of course, the rise of iPods and the inclusion of MP3 players in phones have made CDs less important, to the point that CDs now sit in a tiny, disorganized section at big box stores or book stores (for as long as they still exist). For the most part, the record store has gone the way of the video store. There are still a few here or there and the best of those is one I visited today, the Mecca of music stores, Amoeba Music in San Francisco.

I wanted to go because it's in the Haight, which is just a fun little area to walk around and people-watch (to see them try to recapture an era that quickly became a mockery of itself forty years ago), but also because it's a site to behold, as you can see in the pictures on the website. Thousands upon thousands of CDs, a good amount of vinyl, a nice video area with a huge foreign section. It would be fun to leaf through the rows of albums, seeing if I can find anything cool to pick up. I recognized that I could get anything through iTunes, but I grew up with record stores and I was pretty sure that I still valued the concept of holding a physical product in my hand. Sure, I've probably bought three physical CDs in the last two or three years (two Eminem albums and a special edition of the Ben Folds/Nick Hornby collaboration), but I was holding on to nostalgia, if nothing else.

So I began walking through the aisles, looking at the CDs and it hit me immediately. Immediately. There was absolutely no reason for me to ever buy another CD again. It wasn't some huge epiphany. It wasn't something I had to work out in my head. It was immediate and obvious. Anything I bought would be just as, if not more, expensive as/than anything I could buy on iTunes or Amazon MP3 and I'd just have to then take the disc home and load it into iTunes so I could get it into my phone. So instead of looking around to buy something, I treated the store like a museum. Took a picture of the Green Jello album. Flipped through the Ben Folds and They Might Be Giants stacks. Checked out Bon Iver at a listening station to see if I'd want to buy it on iTunes (verdict: yuck). I guess that's progress for you. I didn't lament not wanting to buy a CD because it would just seem more inconvenient than downloading the album. I just accepted it as a universal reality that buying CDs is done. And then I tweeted about it and put it on Facebook while I was standing there.

Epilogue: My quick-thinking wife actually pointed out a reason to buy a CD. Unlike a Best Buy or a Target, Amoeba had used CDs that they sold at a lower price. So, for example, I think I had Flood on cassette or a disc that I couldn't find, so we picked up a copy for $4, much cheaper than I can get it for on iTunes. I also grabbed a couple of used DVDs (the brilliant Korean film, Save the Green Planet, and the entire series of Da Ali G Show; $9.99 each!), so we did buy some stuff there.

Worst of the Worst: #57, Godsend

2011-06-18T10:54:00.002-04:00

Godsend is a horror movie that isn't scary, but that's true of a lot of movies that are bad, but not bad enough to be on this list (for instance, Saw). Visually, it's not bad. The acting isn't too bad, either. There's a kid actor in the main role who's so-so, but Greg Kinnear is always at least solid, Robert De Niro hasn't been in a good movie in a while but is never really bad, and even Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is fine and only slightly bad when she has to do any emotional scenes. The script itself is pretty lame, with too much exposition at points to move the poorly-paced story along. There are a good number of continuity errors, including a newspaper at the end that has a misspelling in the headline. But, yeah, for the most part the movie is merely less-than-average. What kills me is the plot.

Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos play the loving parents of a loving son (all set up lovingly in the opening scenes), but the son is killed in a horrible (read: too contrived) accident. After the funeral, they are approached by De Niro, who is a brilliant genetic scientist (and somehow Romijn-Stamos' freshman professor, even though she's a photographer). He has a way of cloning the boy and the parents agree to try it out. De Niro goes into this long explanation of the process, meant to confuse us into not thinking about it critically, and then the mother is impregnated when a pre-stem cell (?) is injected into an egg and then delivers the child after nine months. Everything is the same for the first eight years of the kid's life. Anyone who's read The Boys from Brazil knows that this is ridiculous. The original boy had died on the day after his eighth birthday and, sure enough, on the day after his eighth birthday, the new kid starts seeing visions of a dead child and turns evil. He gets all creepy and murder-y, showing up at weird times in dark rooms to shock his parents and then killing the school bully (a murder that the local police decide not to investigate, apparently). Then, there is a twist that is so implausible and so impossible scientifically in any sense of real life that I couldn't totally understand why or how said twist came to be. They probably just didn't explain it because the actors would have had too hard a time not laughing. Anyways, the kid is somehow possessed genetically (I think) and everyone's running around doing nothing to stop him, other than running into dark rooms that he scares them in. Kinnear gets hit by a blunt object hard enough to pass out in a burning room, but somehow shows up minutes later, just in time to stop an axe from chopping someone up. Finally, nothing happens at the end to resolve anything and everyone is essentially in the same place they were right before the climax.

The end.

Well, one of the ends. They had such a hard time wrapping up such a ridiculous plot that they actually shot five different endings. The other four are available on the DVD and I watched them, including the first with commentary from the writer and director. Sure enough, the director actually admits that none of the endings really worked, so they just went with the one that is least black and white because they couldn't figure out how to appropriately resolve the characters. At least the guy was honest.

I'm not sure that Godsend really belongs on this list, because it's just not poorly-made to the level of some of these other movies. But, on the list it is, making it the ninety-fourth that I've watched. Six left.

Worst of the Worst: #11, Merci Docteur Rey!

2011-06-15T23:17:00.003-04:00

Merci Docteur Rey! is the worst movie I have ever seen.

I hope that over these ninety reviews (I started out having seen three of the movies) over the last twenty or so months, you have seen that I've tried not to exaggerate the level of awfulness of any of these movies. I've written about how bad many of them have been, but I've saved any superlatives for a very select few. I'm often prone to hyperbole, but I take this seriously. I've loved bad movies my whole life, but I had never set out to expressly watch them like I have in this project, so I honestly want to leave this list with an understanding of where the different movies fall. So, let me state it again, so you can see where this one falls.

Merci Docteur Rey! is the worst movie I have ever seen.

It's not just the plot, about the son of an opera diva who is closeted and goes to meet an older man only to find out after witnessing the man's murder that he was his father and upon finding this runs to a psychiatrist who it turns out has died of a heart attack and is sitting in a chair Weekend-At-Bernie's-style and the guy then turns to the crazy patient at the time for therapy while he attempts to find the murderer on his own. It's not just the acting, which is almost the worst I've ever seen (you can't top Travolta in Battlefield Earth or Chris Klein in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li), even though it includes Dianne Wiest and freaking Vanessa Redgrave and Simon Callow. A lot of it is the direction, which is easily the worst I've ever seen with atrocious framing and editing. It's not just the music, which never fits the scene. It's not just the dialogue, which is partly in French and partly in English and wholly bulls***. It's not even the ending, which involves a completely unbelievable line and curtains closing while one of the characters inexplicably drops in on a cable, but then the movie isn't over and keeps going for a few minutes while I alternate between cursing and shaking my head. No, it's all of this and more. When you're up against Battlefield Earth and The Master of Disguise and 3 Strikes, you can't just be pretty bad in all aspects; you have to be horrendous in all of them. Success!

My watching experience went something like this: I watched the first five minutes and considered breaking the DVD in half -- I figured that since it got 0% on Rotten Tomatoes and only earned $19,500 in theaters, I may have had the only copy not owned by someone who made the movie, assuming they didn't already throw it away to deny any hand they had in it. I proceeded to watch a good portion of the movie while yelling, "What the f*** is this?!" every so often. I began to hold my head in my hands. I mocked every line. I rewound the ending with the curtain to make sure I saw it right. Finally, as the credits rolled, I fell back on the sofa, exhausted.

Battlefield Earth was a big budget sci-fi movie. The Master of Disguise was a slapstick kid's comedy starring a major comedian. Merci Docteur Rey! is a foreign-ish film with a budget that was probably less than Battlefield Earth's catering bill. It's really difficult to compare these three. They all failed in their own way and deserve recognition for being, in the first two movies' cases, an epic disappointment and the embodiment of negative entertainment value, respectively. But it is the third movie above that is so poorly conceived and executed that you question not just the existence of the movie, but the existence of everyone who had anything to do with this movie. You see on imdb that people who saw this movie at film festivals thought it was brilliant and realize that it is so perplexing that these people thought it was art and therefore needed to say it was brilliant in order to look like they understood it and you pity them and their sad inferiority-complex-having lives. Battlefield Earth and The Master of Disguise, as mainstream Hollywood movies, are more easily understood to be historically bad and more easily understood to have been reaching for some sort of brass ring of which they fall way, way short. You can talk about expectations and you can talk about prior knowledge of a movie and you can talk about being more upset with a Travolta or a Carvey when they put out dreck, but, no, none of that matters when the cold hard truth is staring you in the face.

Merci Docteur Rey! is the worst movie I have ever seen.

Worst of the Worst: #52, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

2011-06-13T22:09:00.002-04:00

On this list, there have been a number of movies with names attached to them that have belied the actual lack of quality of the movie. One would hope that Guy Ritchie could do better than Swept Away, that Ben Kingsley wouldn't show up in any of these, that Al Pacino would never have sunk to where he is now. Alas, big names attached to a movie do not a great movie make. But that seems nearly impossible when it comes to The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It's based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Thornton Wilder, the 23rd best American novel of the 20th century, according to Time. It stars Gabriel Byrne, Robert DeNiro, F. Murray Abraham, Harvey Keitel, and Kathy Bates. There's no way that it could be that bad, right?

Wrong.

It's really bad. Really, it's more boring than anything else (exacerbated by the fact that over the weekend, I saw two of the most extraordinarily un-boring movies of the past year, Super 8 and Black Swan). The story involves an incident in Peru where five people fell to their deaths when a bridge collapsed. A monk was watching and he investigates the lives of the deceased to see if it is mere coincidence or if God really has a plan. Since he is questioning God, the Inquisition tries him for heresy. The movie ends up being a procedural with flashbacks where we learn about the lives of the people who will eventually meet their demise -- with five or ten minutes left to go in the movie, which makes them luckier than the rest of us. I imagine the book is better paced than the movie, which is interminable. Whereas the book splits the stories up so you're following one person all the way through, the movie mixes everything together so you can't tell what is going on at any given point (if you even cared to know it, in the first place).

The boredom is bad, but the worst part of the movie is the fact that, given the source material and actors, the inexperienced director (who nobody has ever heard of) squandered her riches by being utterly lost. The timing is abysmal. Her script is written to be read, not spoken. Can you imagine Harvey Keitel delivering really stilted Skakespeare-esque lines? Please try hard not to. Worst of all is that line delivery. I don't like when English-speaking actors are asked to use accents to signify that they are speaking another language. This, of course, is worst when it's people in Rome speaking in British accents for some reason, but it goes for people with Spanish or German accents. Ridiculous. And yet, I may have learned to get over that with this movie. The director had the actors use no accent at all other than their own. So, you get a Peruvian court case where Gabriel Byrne has his Irish accent defending himself against DeNiro with his New York accent. Kathy Bates seems to be the only person who even tries, but that could be because she has no discernible accent.

I think, in watching this, I discovered that a great actor can make an entertaining movie from a mediocre one. Denzel Washington has made a career on this. But not even the best actor can make an entertaining movie from a really bad one. Those actors who make only good movies are apparently really talented at picking the right movie with the right script and right director. To paraphrase Wilder's last line, good cinema is solid ground and an actor's choice is the tenuous bridge that break at any moment, plunging us all to the depths of a bad movie.

Worst of the Worst: #43, Darkness

2011-06-08T00:52:00.002-04:00

Some movies like last night's King's Ransom are bad and could never have worked under any circumstances. Some movies like tonight's Darkness are bad and could have easily worked under different circumstances. But, alas, no. What could have been a pretty chilling horror movie was instead a confusing mess that had no thrill at all.

Darkness is your standard haunted house fare. Family moves into a house. Kid starts hearing weird things under the bed. Father goes insane. Teenage daughter is the only one who figures everything out. Et cetera. In this case, the father is played by Iain Glen (who I quite like as Jorah Mormont on Game of Thrones) and the daughter is played by Anna Paquin. So you have some acting talent, but they are asked to deliver nonsense. And I don't just mean that the lines are poorly written; they seriously often don't make any sense. It's just a bunch of words strung together that are supposed to convey some sort of plot about Satan worship, but don't make the viewer care at all. Speaking of Old Scratch, I'd like to revise one of the most famous lines in modern cinema. It is not true that the greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he didn't exist The greatest trick the devil ever played was working his way into movie after movie even though that whole thing was pretty tired even by the time Sardo Numspa came after Chandler Jarrell.

But even the worst script in a horror movie can be saved by true scares, but this one has none of those. There are ghostly kids inhabiting the house, but they really just stand there and stare at people, which is about as scary as the Today Show audience. Every time someone is about to be killed, we instead get flashes of millisecond clips of weird images, which is about as scary as a kaleidoscope. At the end, the evil turns out to actually be darkness, so all of the killing occurs when the screen is pitch black, which is about as scary as turning your TV off. Which I could have easily done to escape the boredom. The director went for super artsy instead of super scary and missed. Could have been creepy, ended up with incoherence.

So, yeah, in the end it was all about Darkness, imprisoning me, all I could see, no absolute horror. So bored that I felt like I could not live, but I could not die, trapped in myself, images on the TV my holding cell. Maybe better off without my sight or hearing, too.

Ninety-one down, nine to go.

Worst of the Worst: #4, King's Ransom

2011-06-06T22:47:00.003-04:00

Oh, my God...

I squealed in ecstasy as I watched the first five or ten minutes of King's Ransom. Do you remember the first time you watched the first tracking shot of The Godfather or the opening chord and title scroll of Star Wars? It is mesmerizing to watch the object of pure beauty that comes from when a group of people -- director, writers, actors, musicians -- join together in the goal of making something perfect and then actually succeed. De Palma's savage gang meeting scene in The Untouchables, with David Mamet's classic baseball monologue and De Niro's cocky but menacing delivery. The chemistry between Shaw, Scheider, and Dreyfuss, as they sit around the table on the boat, captured so realistically by Spielberg. These and so many more of the greatest moments in cinematic history, almost a living symbiosis of talent aimed at putting on celluloid what nobody else has ever seen. And then, in 2005, directors and writers and actors and so on and so on got together and set out to make one of the worst movies the world had ever seen.

That has to be what happened, because it's the only way anyone could have made a movie this goddam bad.

No matter that Jeffrey Byrd only directed music videos and a couple of independent movies before tackling this project. No matter that Wayne Conley wrote for Keenan and Kel and Nick Cannon before turning his pen to this. No matter that Anthony Anderson has been in mostly bad movies or that Jay Mohr's film and TV career was never what you may have thought after Jerry Maguire or that Charlie Murphy somehow got an acting job. No matter any of this, because the mite that lives in the turd that was thrown at a slack-jawed petting zoo patron by a bored, malnourished monkey could see that everything was wrong with everything that was happening around King's Ransom.

The acting is so poorly timed that it looks like everyone was shown their line for two seconds upside-down and in Pig Latin and then asked to recite it back. The lines themselves are so poorly written that I almost paused the movie to look for more depth of narrative in Goodnight, Moon. The sound effects -- yes, sound effects -- that they play to emphasize what is supposed to pass for a joke -- and they are not funny, no matter how often Anderson fake laughs after his own delivery -- are so ubiquitous that I thought one of the sound editors had let their two-year-old loose because they just didn't care about what they are doing. Nothing in this movie works; towards being a good movie, that is. I could tell within the first five minutes that I was in for something epic. Sometimes, it's just that obvious. So many of these bad movies have been purely boring that it is a relief to see something so excruciatingly and offensively, well, bad.

It is in our nature to look for meaning in things that we don't understand. Lightning turns into a weapon hurled from Mount Olympus. Rainbows turn into a promise from God. A movie that does not work in any way on any level is rationalized as an attempt to satirize Hollywood by striving for perfect imperfection. Or maybe none of them gave a s***. Either way, I salute them. I enjoyed the destruction of all of their careers thoroughly.

Worst of the Worst: #62, Serving Sara

2011-06-03T00:05:00.002-04:00

This movie brings up a question I have about a profession I know very little about. Serving Sara is about a process server. I've seen on TV the usual bit about process servers where they walk up to someone, ask the person their name to confirm identity, and then give the person the papers. I have no reason not to believe this is how it works in real life. Sometimes, the process server has to pretend to be someone else to get close to the target. That seems a bit fishy, but I guess it could happen. I just assume that most process servers are straightforward and, perhaps, fairly apathetic, like Seth Rogen in Pineapple Express. In Serving Sara, however, the process servers do all kinds of wacky tricks to track their person down because everyone seems to know that papers are coming and don't want them. One of the characters even explains this in the beginning by saying something along the lines of, "Being served papers is never a good thing." But does it really get so wacky that it turns into a spy-like thing? Or that the people being served try even wackier things to evade the papers like constantly pretending to be other people or even hiding in the middle of monster truck rallies?

So, you can see how I was already a little put upon by the ins and outs of the process serving industry, as depicted in this movie, but there's not much else in the film to recommend it. First off -- let's get the elephant out of the room -- Serving Sara was written by the team that wrote Norbit and the upcoming The Zookeeper (slapstick comedy with animals talking to Kevin James). There's all you need to know about the script. The director is not as poor in the resume department, but his work here left me annoyed. So many of the scenes involve people talking to each other with close-ups as each character delivers their lines. The cuts back and forth and the close-ups kill any kind of chemistry the actors may have had. Of course, they had none, so it just left me to be annoyed with how choppy it felt.

The actors themselves are the "stars" of the awfulness in this movie. Elizabeth Hurley as the love interest just can not act. Fine straight person for Mike Myers, bad romantic comedy lead. Vinny Pastore is just not meant to be in comedies (or, frankly, play any role other than Big Pussy). Bruce Campbell is the king of cult films, but his style does not fit with a mainstream romantic comedy. Cedric the Entertainer has appeared on this list of bad movies a number of times and, while he doesn't have tons of screen time, his acting in this is about as bad as he's been in any of the other movies. His role strikes me as a desperate attempt someone made to add any kind of last-second humor into what they knew would be a desperately unfunny movie (this move was done most egregiously with the obviously added scenes of Wanda Sykes in Evan Almighty, which I can't believe didn't make this list). That brings us to the lead actor, Matthew Perry.

I'm not a Matthew Perry fan. In fact, I don't like any of the Friends actors except for Matt LeBlanc in Episodes and Lisa Kudrow in a very few roles. Perry is just way too smug for me and he's very smug in this movie, but he has a bigger problem. During the filming of Serving Sara, Perry had to take a break because he went to rehab for a painkiller addiction. And it is obvious that he had the problem when you watch the movie. The Matthew Perry of Serving Sara is the bloated, disinterested, rough-looking Matthew Perry of the tabloids. He just looks strung out. So no matter that his lines are written poorly or that the big oh-please-won't-you-please-laugh-at-our-movie scene involves him with his arm up a bull's ass while it has sex with a mechanical cow, Perry is unfunny because you're uneasy watching him. That was enough for me to dislike the movie.

But it didn't end there! The only thing worse than watching a bad movie with bad acting is when someone you like shows up and you just feel sorry for them and dirty for watching them debase themselves in a piece of garbage. That happened with The New Kid and Zooey Deschanel and it happened with Bless The Child with Jimmy Smits, but nothing tops Serving Sara because it wasn't just someone I like it was one of the most talented actors, period. Sure enough, Matthew Perry tries to find Bruce Campbell's mistress at one point and we discover that she is played by none other than Amy Adams. Let that sink in for a second. You're watching a movie that stars Matthew Perry, Elizabeth Hurley, Cedric the Entertainer, and Vincent Pastore, and here comes Amy Adams. Sure, it was her first big studio movie, so when people originally watched it, she was just some random chick, but I didn't watch it in 2002 (when I had better sense, apparently). No, I had to watch it after Adams had established herself as acting gold. It just made me feel dirty.

So the writing was bad, the direction was annoying, the acting was atrocious, and I felt uneasy. Good times! Like many movies on this list, though, the one thing stopping it from being truly horrendous was that it just got boring. It wasn't offensively bad throughout. By the end, I was staring at the clock, wondering why they hadn't wrapped up the plot yet, when I knew there were only seventeen or so minutes left. And then it was blessedly over! Eighty-nine movies down, eleven to go, and this one not a moment too soon.

Worst of the Worst: #29, Bless The Child

2011-05-31T23:42:00.002-04:00

I am not surprised in the least that Larry the Cable Guy had three films on this list, nor that Carmen Electra had six or seven and Eddie Griffin had what seems like seventy. I am surprised that Bless The Child marks the second film on the list for Rufus Sewell and even somewhat surprised that it marks the first for Jimmy Smits. Smits has come to be regarded as one of our finer actors, always likable, and that is no different here. Unfortunately, both of these actors star in this movie with Kim Basinger, who is awful.

Basinger won an Oscar and was a can't-miss star at one time, but she has completely fallen apart. What's the last relevant movie in which she appeared? Judging by her imdb profile, it's either as Eminem's mother in 8 Mile in 2002, or all the way back to 1997 for her Oscar-winning performance in L.A. Confidential. Maybe she's just out of practice? She overacts in this film like an amateur. Not that even a good performance from her would save this garbage.

Basinger stars as a woman who takes on her infant niece from her dope-addict sister. Six years later, the girl has something special to her. Kids her age are being kidnapped and murdered. The mother shows back up with Rufus Sewell -- playing a self-help guru -- in tow and takes the girl. We find out quickly that they are taking her for a Satanist cult. Smits plays a cop who used to want to be a priest and he recognizes the Satanic aspects of the cult. Murder, hunt, chase, blah, blah, blah. It's all just really boring, and that's saying something because it turns out the whole thing really is about Satan. There's all kinds of supernatural crap with demons flying around and messengers of God showing up. Satan himself even shows up at the very end (and does nothing but sit in a chair for two seconds!).

So, whatever, it's a total B-movie. Bad acting, awful special effects, worse camera work. It should be hilarious, but it's not. Just boring.

Worst of the Worst: #61, Good Luck Chuck

2011-05-24T21:36:00.002-04:00

There is a lot about this movie that absolutely confuses me. Most of all, how there is not one good thing about it but it is still not offensively bad. By offensively bad, I mean to the level that you get angry or that it causes physical pain, like other movies on this list have. Instead, Good Luck Chuck flits between boring and eye-roll-inducing. Another thing about this movie that confuses me is more of a general brain-freeze about why anyone likes Dane Cook in any way. I mean, why he's put in movies, why people give him one red cent, why people don't run screaming whenever the concept of him comes to mind. Therein may lie the answer to my first question; maybe the movie isn't so bad because I can't hate it any more than I hate him. His presence sets expectations so low that no amount of awfulness could make this movie as bad as, say, the often funny Dana Carvey in Master of Disguise or 3 Strikes by DJ Pooh, the director of the great Friday.

Other than Cook's presence out-sucking the rest of the movie, the rest of the movie is bad in its own right. The writing is just one-liner after gross-out joke after slapstick gag, with all falling flatter than a manhole cover that I'd gladly pry open to dump every copy of this DVD into the sewers where they belong. There is also a lot of sex and maybe more naked breasts than any movie I can remember that came out since like 1982. Animal House thinks there were too many boobs in this movie (and I'm not even counting Cook and his co-stars, ha-ha!). There is a fairly graphic montage that involves Cook having sex with dozens of women. Yay!

Cook plays a guy who is cursed and every woman he sleeps with gets married to the next person they meet. Other than being the story of my college relationships, it's romantic comedy boilerplate. Women chase after him, wanting to sleep with him so they can meet their true love, until he finds the girl of his dreams and doesn't want to lose her. The girl of his dreams is played by Jessica Alba, who is very easy to look at but not very easy to watch act. Of course, to be fair, she's only playing off of Dane Cook and the guy who played Lonny in the first few seasons of 30 Rock, so there's not much to work with there. I keep Cook stinks, but it's true. His acting is awful and he lacks chemistry with every object, living or not, with whom he shares the screen.

Do people like Dane Cook because he sounds sort of like John Corbett and everyone likes John Corbett? Do people like him because MySpace drove you so batty that you had no other choice? Do people like him because it's easier to just give in? I'll never understand.

On a side note, this movie being one of the bigger movies on the list, I got it from Netflix in Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray enhances everything on the screen, which is fantastic for gorgeous movies like 127 Hours. It also enhances jerky camera movements -- such as in the pretty funny Cyrus -- which can be annoying. It also makes bad movies look as clear as real life, which is exceptionally disturbing. It makes me pray, in a sick way, that someone decides to release Battlefield Earth in Blu-Ray.

Going Back

2011-05-23T23:53:00.002-04:00

Tonight, as I'm sure everyone has marked on their calendar, is the first anniversary of the airing of the Lost series finale. In going back and thinking about it -- and in rewatching The Wire, which I hadn't seen since before Lost ended -- I'm realizing that The Wire, while better than Lost, is not as better as I would have thought. That's not to diminish the hands-down greatest show ever to air, but to say that Lost is way, way up there. It wasn't just a fun (read: confounding) mystery; it was a really good show. Anyway, I saw this video for the first time today and thought it was pretty cool. Someone took the last minute or so of the final episode and put it against the first minute or so of the pilot played backwards. Nice job by the director and the editor. Fun when you can find little things like this that make something really good that much better.

Worst of the Worst: #3, Pinocchio

2011-05-22T23:55:00.003-04:00

One has to imagine that during a great and prolonged tragedy, those suffering just shut down mentally. When things are so bad for so long, the mind understands that there is nothing better coming along and that it can only get but so much worse, so everything goes numb. There can still be hope, but it's mostly all about just making it through, surviving.

This is what it's like to watch Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio.

Well, it's unfair to say that Benigni's Pinocchio is so awful, not in how he intended it to be. It is in Italian and produced as if it is a stage play, with intentional overacting. I watched a bit of the Italian version with subtitles and it comes off as very foreign. It's not made with American sensibilities, so who are we to say it's bad. In fact, it won a number of awards in Italy. Yes, it's bizarre that Benigni is playing a little boy, but it's no weirder -- if you look at it as a stage adaptation -- than Sandy Duncan playing Peter Pan at an advanced age.

No, the Pinocchio that is ranked by Rotten Tomatoes as the third-worst movie of the first decade of the twenty-first century is the English dubbed version. It was dubbed with recognizable English-speaking actors and released in theaters here, so it's okay to apply American sensibilities. So, it turns out not to be Benigni's fault, but the Miramax people who decided to bring it over here and turn it into one of the handful of worst movies I've ever seen.

Benigni playing a little boy puppet? Weird. Benigni playing it with Breckin Meyers' voice? Nearly unwatchable. It's not just the strange choice in voices, but the way that the English speakers read the Italian translation almost literally, making the dialogue choppy. Plus, it just sounds read, not spoken, giving the entire movie a disjointed feel. And Eddie Griffin shows up in another on of these bad movies, as he and Cheech Marin play a couple of crooks. But more than anything, really, Breckin Meyers speaking for Roberto Benigni playing a little boy.

The whole thing was weird, with the puppet prancing around and getting into stupid problem after stupid problem. The cricket special effect is awful, as is the one for the nose growing. Gepetto has a ridiculous toupee and the related humor falls flat. People exclaim way too many things for the sake of exclaiming them. There is a lot of licking of lollipops, with the licking sounds being disgusting and distracting. It's a mess, enough of one that it destroyed Benigni's career in the United States even though he was coming off a Best Actor Oscar for one of the great movies of our time.

Yet, I found myself after a while watching it and thinking, this isn't so bad. It's weird and stupid, but it doesn't belong this high up on the list. But then, Pinocchio talked to a donkey and pet its face as it died and kissed it and tried to get it to lick a lollipop, and I thought to myself: "What is this crap that I'm watching?!" Indeed, the movie had been so bad throughout that no one part felt worse than any other and it all just felt average. It was a coping mechanism for getting through the atrocity of this movie. Benigni's greatest film triumph, La Vita e Bella, was about a man doing what he could to keep hopes up in the face of unspeakable tragedy. Damn, I could have used him when I was watching this.

TV Recommendation

2011-05-20T00:11:00.001-04:00

Good lord, I've done this a thousand times, but I mean it. Parks and Recreation is on Netflix Watch Instantly. If you have never seen it, do it. Now. Mad Men is the only show currently airing that is as consistently great, episode to episode.

Worst of the Worst: #31, The Covenant

2011-05-17T23:36:00.002-04:00

Not every movie begs for a lot of language to review them. This one is just bad. It's a CW-ish movie about teen warlocks who fight each other and date women and stuff. I like Jessica Lucas (Cloverfield, 90210) and you have to love Taylor Kitsch (Riggins from FNL), but nobody in this one is really any good. Bad acting delivering a lazy script that is way overdirected and involves really awful CGI. There's the movie in one sentence.

Worst of the Worst: #67, The Hottie And The Nottie

2011-05-14T23:02:00.002-04:00

There are not many fundamentally worse movies than the ones that deal with a man who falls in love with a seemingly unattractive woman because he sees her inner beauty. The man never actually falls in love with the woman until she's had some sort of makeover, making her actually beautiful. Stupid and insulting.

But there's a lot more stupid and insulting about The Hottie and the Nottie than just the plot, though it is probably the worst of the "inner beauty" movies. For one thing, the unattractiveness of the woman is quite extreme. She has moles, a unibrow, mangled teeth, an infected toenail, and boogers dangling out of her nose. Everyone think she's hideous and she's never kissed anyone. But the main character falls in love with her! After she has major skin treatments, her teeth are fixed, her mole is removed, and her hair grows in with Rogaine.

The movie is probably most famous for starring Paris Hilton, but even she isn't the most stupid and insulting thing about it. Yes, she is an awful actress. All of her lines are delivered with a smiling apathy and the movie is more concerned with showing her running in a bathing suit in slow motion, but she's not the worst part of the movie. That's how bad it is. The worst part is the constant ineptitude displayed by almost all involved. The script looks to have been strung together by fifty people who each wrote a few sentences at the beginning of a Nyquil sleep. The direction was quite possibly undertaken by a chimpanzee. It's not all bad, though; there are constant sound effects to highlight the "jokes"!

The two romantic leads, Christine Lakin and Joel Moore, are likable enough and that's what keeps this movie from challenging Battlefield Earth for worst ever. Once the bad makeup is off, Lakin is as cute and smart as you'd want from a romantic comedy. Moore does yeoman's work all along with the Nyquil-inspired arrangement of letters that he was given to read. Because the two are okay, the end of the movie ends up being pretty boring, which is an improvement. Boring isn't bad enough. It needs to be actively bad to get into that "worst ever" conversation.

On a side note, Moore is one lucky guy. He stars in this movie, which by all rights should have destroyed his movie career. It's estimated that each showing of The Hottie and the Nottie in theaters averaged five viewers. One year later, Avatar comes out, with him as Sam Worthington's sidekick. His bad movie doesn't get seen by too many people and his good movie gets seen by everyone. Jackpot, bullet dodged.

Brilliance

2011-05-11T22:33:00.000-04:00

If you haven't yet seen the article of the day, I have it for you. It is so deliciously subversive, taking a twisted look at the biggest news story of the last two years and doing it in such a subtle way that you can laugh without realizing what they are doing. Plus, the comments are pretty funny.

So, as set up, here is the original article from The New York Times announcing bin Laden's death.

And here is the article of the day, as the head of a great and powerful nation announces that the leader of their enemy is finally dead.

Read This

2011-05-10T22:02:00.003-04:00

It's the rare news story that can make you tear up. The two that jump to mind immediately are Gene Weingarten's Pulitzer-winning piece about people who have forgotten their children in cars and the New Yorker piece about the man who was wrongfully executed. Both are very, very sad.

Here's a third, but it's not sad. It made me tear up because it's beautiful. It's a very short read and I highly recommend it -- a piece from the Washington Post about one connection forged by the random destruction of the Alabama tornado.

Thor: Alien of Thunder

2011-05-09T22:39:00.002-04:00

I don't think it's unusual to see a summer blockbuster-type of movie and be entertained and then nitpick it to hell after you leave the theater. My problem with Thor is that I thought it was just okay, at best, and then I nitpicked it until I think it's garbage. The love story plot is simply pathetic. The CGI in Asgard is just too much; it looks really fake. The major battle at the end is so weak that it makes the battle at the end of Iron Man 2 look good. Yes, there are a couple of decent parts, good comic relief, but that's overshadowed by what I thought was the unwatchable nature of almost every scene that doesn't happen on Earth.

But my biggest problem with the movie has nothing to do with the plot or look or acting (which, granted, wasn't so bad). My problem is in the way the movie kowtowed to the religious right. Odin, Thor, Loki, and company are gods. They are Norse gods. It's the mythology, no different in the comic. Shoot, the video game of the movie is even called Thor: God of Thunder. In the movie, though? Nope. The movie makes it very, very clear that they are not gods in any way, shape, or form. They are called warriors in the voiceover at the beginning, warriors who came to our world to defend us from evil. At one point, a character tells us that they are essentially aliens, beings from another realm who may have been mistaken for deities by a primitive people. I'm not kidding. The script comes just short of having a character turn to the camera and say, "Hey, please don't protest us for saying that there's more than one god!" There's a lot I didn't like about the movie, but I admit it's a necessary evil to set up for The Avengers next year. This kowtowing, however, is unforgivable to me.

Garyland

2011-05-05T22:19:00.002-04:00

The Monologue:

It seems like three senators may have seen fake bin Laden pictures and thought they were the real thing. They also told me that Microsoft will pay me $1 for everybody to whom I forward an e-mail.
Gary Williams is retiring and Gus Johnson is leaving CBS. Great day to be a college basketball fan!
It's quite possible that Dos Equis' douchebag "Most Interesting Man in the World" is the only person who knows what Cinco de Mayo actually signifies which, therefore, makes him less interesting.

Random Pop Culture:

I do think Parks and Recreation is the best comedy on network TV, but Community broke off another epic episode tonight with its follow-up to last year's great paintball episode. The spoof of westerns, from the new theme song to Troy wearing Cleavon Little's outfit, was strong. Any Lost fan, though, has to have loved Josh Holloway's part, including his nickname that he dropped on Alison Brie at the end. And speaking of Alison Brie, she totally stole the show.
"Birthdays were invented by Hallmark to sell cards." How many more of these do we need before we can get a Ron Swanson Quote-a-Day calendar?
I couldn't be more in favor of gay marriage, but Grey's got way preachy about it tonight. Bailey's line implying God is in favor of same-sex marriage is bound to have gotten a few people riled up.

Random Music Video:

He's a moron and this is a weird-ass video, but the man is a musical genius.

Worst of the Worst: #45, My Baby's Daddy

2011-05-03T22:49:00.002-04:00

Here's a quick synopsis worthy of a review. Anthony Anderson, Eddie Griffin, and Michael Imperioli are best friends from birth who all get their girlfriends pregnant at the same time. They all have to deal with life issues while learning about being fathers. The babies actually are not consistent players in the movie, just coming in here and there for comic relief. Plus, they're like a year old for almost the entire movie, other than a quick poop and pee joke early on. The plot makes no sense and the idea of having Eddie Griffin play a nerd makes even less sense. It's just stupid and disorganized.

So, to give you a sense of how coherent this movie is, here is a quick synopsis worthy of the movie.

Three guys are friends, but babies poop and pee in their faces and one girl is obnoxious to them. Birthing class and Asian stereotypes galore, plus white rappers talk like black people until they go to the Apollo and get in trouble. Babies crawl and slide down laundry chute and then crawl out the door to sit on couch and hang out. Marriage proposals, hey, isn't that Naomi from Lost, baby mama is a lesbian, jogging suits and baby carriers. Laughter to signify friendship.

Reaction

2011-05-02T22:09:00.004-04:00

Spent a lot of time today just reading people's thoughts on blogs, seeing how my own thoughts fit in. I think this news is a big deal, like really big. The Fix tweeted last night asking how many stories in the past decade have been bigger this one. I agree with him on 9/11, Katrina, and the 2008 election, but other than that? May not be a bigger one. I feel weird celebrating someone's death, but it doesn't feel wrong in this case.

Along those lines, there have been some quotations that have been very popular today. I'll print them both below -- you may have seen them in countless tweets and Facebook statuses -- along with a third that has something in common with the first two. You see, none of them are actually real.

“I’ve never wished a man dead. But, I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.” – Mark Twain

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The problem with quotes on the Internet is that it is hard to verify their authenticity." -- Abraham Lincoln

I've Been Here For Years

2011-05-02T00:07:00.002-04:00

I was going to write a bad movie review, but you'll have to wait until tomorrow. As I was getting ready to write it, the news of a press conference broke out, followed by a great Twitter night. Tweet of the night was from Patton Oswalt: "No matter how collected Obama is during his speech, he's hearing LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out" blasting in his head."

Indeed.

Not-So-Random Music Video

2011-04-29T00:41:00.002-04:00

I may not care so much about "The Wedding" but I know it's a big deal. So, come on, there can be only one song.

Give Me Your Racist, Your Stupid, Your Befuddled Masses

2011-04-27T23:59:00.004-04:00

The Monologue:

When I heard Hawaii released the president's birth certificate today, I was really hoping it would just be a blank sheet of paper that only read: "Go f*** yourself."
I try not to generalize, but I mean this: all birthers are stupid and racist. All of them. Both things.

Random Pop Culture:

It's been a while since Sunday night reigned over TV, but it's back. In terms of dramas, the only network one that's really worthwhile is The Chicago Code. Granted, I don't watch Justified on FX, but the three best dramas currently airing are all on cable and all on Sunday night.
AMC's The Killing is a superb thriller about the investigation of a murder in Seattle and the intertwined lives of the people who knew the victim and, therefore, are all suspects. It's like Twin Peaks, but without the weird stuff for the sake of weirdness.
HBO has two excellent shows. One is, of course, Treme, David Simon's look at post-Katrina New Orleans that is one of the three best dramas on the air, period (behind, of course, Mad Men and Breaking Bad). The other is Game of Thrones, a politics-based fantasy show about the struggle over a kingdom. You have Peter Dinklage being as awesome as usual as the drunk whoring brother-in-law of the king. You have graphic violence (a wolf tore out a guy's throat in the last episode) and sex (lots of it). Good acting, really beautiful location filming. A fitting addition to HBO's strong drama presence.
Going back to Treme, anyone could be entertained by watching Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters read the phone book, but Peters had not one line in the season premiere. And he was still great. That's how talented he is.
If I'm ranking the shows on TV, I probably pick those three with Parks and Recreation and Community added in. Maybe Treme is #1, with the two comedies after, and then the other two dramas.

Random Music Video:

When I put the baby to bed, I'm pretty much down to one of two music choices from Pandora at this point: the Beatles channel or the They Might Be Giants channel. Usually TMBG. They have a lot of songs, a whole lot, but every so often you get one you recognize and love, and so I started Pandora to get this tonight and I needed to find the video, if only to hear it again.

On Tragedy And Regret

2011-04-26T23:42:00.003-04:00

I was planning on catching up on some TV stuff -- primarily the rebirth of Sunday night greatness -- but something caught my attention and has me wanting to write a little. This evening, The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote two posts on the Civil War, stating his case that it is not a tragedy and then clarifying a little about its inevitability and saying he's glad it happened. Good reading, both the posts and the comments as is the case with all of his stuff, but I have to very respectfully disagree. I am certainly glad that it happened because it led to the abolition of slavery, but I do think it is a tragedy. Six hundred thousand Americans died -- 2% of the total population. No matter the ends, that type of bloodshed is always a tragedy. It just so happens that the ends justify the means and so the Civil War, in my eyes, ends up as a necessary tragedy.

There have been lots of necessary tragedies throughout history. I'm glad the Civil War happened. I'm glad that Pearl Harbor happened because it got the US into the war. I'm glad for Normandy and the slaughter that happened there because it got the Allies that much closer to stopping Hitler. I'm glad for the American Revolution (which nobody really sees as a tragedy, but it's not like nobody died). I'm glad for the French Revolution. I'm glad, at least in a literary sense because I don't believe it actually happened, for the Ten Plagues. All tragedies, all necessary for something positive to come from them. I don't think this is so difficult a position to defend.

A little more difficult to defend is something I believe for my life and something, therefore, I believe for world history. I regret nothing in my life because it's made me the person I am today and I like that person. Expanding that, it means that if I generally like the world -- and it's hard not to like the world compared to how it was at any point in history -- I can't regret anything that has happened. I can mourn, but I accept that it's made us what we are today. I'll just point to Jewish history, which I feel the most comfortable talking about. If it's not for the four hundred years of slavery, we do not become a nation given laws that have lasted us for 3,500 year. If it weren't for the destruction of the Second Temple and the Diaspora, we do not become a rabbinic religion (granted, for good and bad). If it weren't for the Holocaust, maybe Israel doesn't exist as a nation. Yes, that means accepting the Holocaust. I don't think you'll find many rational people that are happy the Holocaust happened, but would the world be what it is today without it?

Look, we don't know. Maybe Israel exists without the Holocaust and the population of Germany and Poland are still going strong (though I doubt it, since the Final Solution was the culmination of an awful lot of other stuff). Maybe slavery ends peacefully without the Civil War (again, I doubt it). History is what it is and we just can't really play guessing games because people are rarely rational actors and can't be gamed out that way. During our visit to Chancellorsville yesterday, I claimed that the South would not have made the massive tactical error they made at Gettysburg in July, 1863, if Jackson had been around. My wife asked if that would have changed the outcome of the war. Realistically, at that point? Doubtful, as I thought about it. Grant was already laying siege to Vicksburg and that was the real turning point. As of January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect and the war had become holy in some ways, so it was doubtful that Lincoln just gives in to a house divided itself. You can make statements of how things would turn out, but you just can't know because they didn't actually happen and any revisionism -- be it the Lost Cause or a book like Fatherland -- is just fantasy.

Where we are in this world is built on the backs of successes and failures, triumphs and tragedies. I can want to change the present, but I can't hope that a different history had led to a different present because I don't really know if that difference would be positive. It's no shame to like who you are, even if you made bad decisions or something bad happened to you, and it's no shame to like who we are even if we made bad decisions or something bad happened to us. Our positive self-esteem -- as a person and as a people -- can come from the positive outcome of a tragedy.

Crazy History

2011-04-25T21:58:00.002-04:00

One of the weirdest grave markers in the US is in a tiny family cemetery -- maybe ten total plots -- near the fields in a defunct plantation in Orange County, VA. The plantation, Ellwood, was home to a small family and their fifty to a hundred slaves. War came to that neck of the woods in May of 1863 when the Army of the Potomac, then led by "Fighting" Joe Hooker, clashed with Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in the area around the nearby home of the Chancellor family, known as Chancellorsville. The Battle of Chancellorsville is lesser known for being Lee's greatest victory, affording him the hubris to launch his ill-fated invasion of Pennsylvania a month later. The battle is better known for being the place in which the South's military prospects took a major hit, as their greatest tactician besides Lee, General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, was shot by his own men late at night after a scouting mission. Two bullets ended up in his left arm and he was rushed to the field hospital, which was set up at the aforementioned Ellwood plantation house. Doctors amputated the arm and he was taken to a house some miles away where he would die about a week later from pneumonia, having never recovered from his wounds. The arm was left on the floor of the house -- the floor is still painted black to cover the bloodstains -- and one of the house's inhabitants picked it up, wanting to make sure it was properly honored. This proper honor meant that they buried the arm in their small family cemetery. In the 148 years since, it has been verified twice that the arm is, indeed, buried there, under the only marker in the cemetery. A marker that pays homage to the appendage of a Southern hero.

Worst of the Worst: #19, Half Past Dead

2011-04-25T01:46:00.002-04:00

Armed gunmen have taken over Alcatraz, which just reopened. They are holding a Supreme Court justice hostage. They are willing to stop at nothing to get what they want. And only one man can stop them: a trained killing machine... played by a 50-year-old, 300-something-pound Steven Seagal.

That's really all you need to know about this movie. The doughy, old Seagal of Steven Seagal: Lawman fame tries and fails to do his one-time action star thing. Ja Rule and Kurupt are both in it and, to the best of my prodigious movie brain, Training Day is the only movie that has more than one rapper in it and isn't awful (but still overrated). There's some back story about Seagal gaining trust as an undercover agent with Ja Rule, but it has nothing to do with anything, really. There's some kind of crazy execution chamber at the new Alcatraz where an inmate can die five different ways, but nobody ever gets killed in it, so who cares? The Supreme Court justice ends up helping someone with their sentence, which is impossible, but it's a freaking Steven Seagal-Ja Rule-Kurupt movie, so anything is technically possible, with the exception of quality.

You only need to know the plot and you need to know about the ending, which incorporates seven of the finest funny-bad minutes you'll ever see. The whole movie, itself, is hilarious, but it peaks at the end. I can't find video to embed because of that pesky copyright thing, so you'll have to see it for yourself. The bad guy, played by Morris Chestnut, has the Justice hostage in a helicopter. Seagal is chasing him in another helicopter. Chestnut throws the Justice out of the copter. Seagal dives out of his and after the woman. You can clearly see that the stunt double for the Justice is wearing a parachute under their coat. Seagal gets the woman in mid-air and saves her. Awesome part, #1. Awesome part, #2, takes place back at the prison where Seagal is visiting Ja Rule to let him know that the Justice has knocked down his sentence. Here starts a sequence as homo-erotic as it gets. Ja Rule asks what his sentence was knocked down to. Seagal replies, "It was knocked down to how fast can you get out of those clothes?" Ja Rule smiles and bites his lower lip. They fist pound through the glass and give each other happy looks while some soft music plays in the background. Such an amazing ending that I made my wife watch it with me and then I watched it a third time.

Kind of hard to believe, but eighty-two movies down, eighteen to go.

Worst of the Worst: #70, New Best Friend

2011-04-22T21:42:00.002-04:00

Not only is there no chance that anyone has ever heard of this movie, but it's not even available on Netflix. It was released for one week in 100 theaters back in 2002 and it made all of $28,000. I was lucky enough to find it on HBO Go, so I sat down to enjoy Mia Kirshner and Taye Diggs do their thing. And then it started, and from the first moment I could tell it sucked. Just the credits alone. There's no way to look at one second of this movie and not think that it cost like $5 to make. Everything about it is shoddy, from the story to the direction to most of the acting.

The movie is about a small college in North Carolina that is only attended by misbehaving rich kids and one poor kid, but it's never explained why she would go there. The poor kid (Kirshner) turns up in the hospital in a coma from a drug overdose, but the circumstances are suspicious, so the young man who is vying to be sheriff investigates with the dean of the school breathing down his neck and trying to stop anything that will bother the rich kids. Diggs as the sheriff puts on an accent worthy of the awful rest of this movie, but you have to wonder why he's even in this. He's way too good an actor and way too big a star for the rest of the garbage that they float out there. The story is told through his investigation, interspersed with a number of flashbacks that come from him interviewing the suspects and other parties of interest. And by "interest" I mean in the case, but nobody was of interest to me in this entire thing. With these flashbacks, most of the movie comes to be told in a Rashomon style. The two problems with that are that a) in a mystery it means that most of the movie could be completely meaningless until the true ending is revealed and b) this movie should never, ever be mentioned in even the same language as anything by Kurosawa.

There are a few scenes where the director attempts to use sex to distract you from the shoddiness of the rest of the movie, but even some actual porn has better acting than most of what's in this one. The story is brought together in an ending that mostly makes sense, but, as I said before, doesn't necessarily fit with anything that happened in any of the flashbacks. You just wind up feeling bad for Taye Diggs, vaguely wondering why one of the characters eats ceramic plates (no lie), and being really happy that the movie is over and you can mark another one off your list.

Catching Up

2011-04-22T00:38:00.001-04:00

HBO Go is amazing. It's HBO's online on demand site and it has every episode of every show. Want to re-watch The Wire? Catch up on Treme? Just finally finished The Pacific and still need to watch the second half of Boardwalk Empire. The Pacific is depressing, if only because of how we are losing that generation, but it is so well-done. And really, really gory.

Other than that, watch tonight's Community. So funny my mouth hurt from smiling so much.

Now, on to catch up on 90210. Spring break!

Listening, Feeling My Feelings, and Brunch

2011-04-20T23:29:00.001-04:00

On a bit of a hiatus from work which means kind of a procrastinating attitude about everything. Traffic Light is really funny, Survivor was really crazy, blah blah blah. Just thinking about 4/20 and how the world might be different if Hitler was a pothead. "Goehring, do you hear that? That was my skull! I am so wasted!"

Worst of the Worst: #60, The Perfect Man

2011-04-18T23:43:00.002-04:00

There have been a number of different ways by which the movies on this list have gone wrong. You've had everything from bad acting to bad direction, even some bad cinematography. In some of the movies, just everything missed. It's rare that I could point to one thing and say, "That's it. But for that one thing, the movie would be at least mediocre." The Perfect Man is just such a movie. But for one thing, it wouldn't be so bad. The problem is that the "one thing" is the story and the script. The acting was fine. Hilary Duff isn't bad, especially in the precocious teen role. Heather Locklear was likable. Who can hate Chris Noth in anything? Nothing was so off with the direction or the pacing. All of those point to a romantic comedy that would not be remarkable in either a positive or negative way. But just like how story can overcome a lot of other factors in a movie, an awful story can sink a movie even if everything else is okay, and the writing that forms the skeleton of this film is so awful that it drags the movie towards the depths of being one of the worst romantic comedies ever.

Locklear plays a woman whose husband left her when she found out she was pregnant (of course, how she ended up with two daughters in that scenario confused me) and, since then, has moved with said daughters from town to town, always leaving after being burned by the last ugly relationship. She's so desperate for a man that she stands up at a parent-teacher assembly and complains about it. Duff is the precocious daughter who has a blog about her constant moves around the country. This lets her provide a narration of the movie, but it again confuses me that she blogs about things she feels about her mother while nobody seems to read it. Upon moving to Brooklyn, Duff decides, with the help of her really stereotypically Brooklyn friend, to invent a perfect man to make her mother happy so they don't have to move anymore. She sends flowers and e-mails and uses a picture of her friend's uncle -- played by Chris Noth, so you know how the movie ends already -- to give the guy a face. Okay, fine, I guess that's cute. This leads to a number of problems:

The mother is sad about her love life, so inventing a guy that she can never meet isn't going to help anyone.
The mother meets a nice, but less attractive, guy who really seems to like her. This "perfect man" ruins that guy's life by making the mother not interested.
Noth's character is nothing to but nice to Duff, but now she's embroiled him in this horrible scheme to lie to her mother and, in one scene, his restaurant is destroyed by a sprinkler system as Duff tries to avoid him and Locklear seeing each other.

What, in one light, can be seen as a precocious teen trying to help her mother feel better can be seen, in a more correct light, as a selfish kid destroying lives around her for the sake of sport. In this more correct light, the plot isn't so much cute as deranged. Sure, maybe everyone's happy in the end except for the nice, less attractive guy, but at what cost? And who else wasn't happy in the end? Everyone who had to see the movie. By the end, I mean the very end. There are some great last lines in movies, from "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" to "And, like that... he's gone" to "I hear voices." Throw The Perfect Man in that pile! The movie ends as Duff decides that she no longer needs to blog about moving around anymore and says, "Now I don't just have a homepage, I have a home."

Nell... From The Movie "Nell"

2011-04-14T23:37:00.002-04:00

Rant:

Not much more annoying these days than the "repost" things on Facebook, the social media version of chain mail, but one has gotten me particularly up in arms. It talks about how we should be angry because the President and Congress make so much more than the average American salary. There's cutely up-in-arms and then there's grossly naive. Not only do I not want my politicians to be making $35,000 a year, but the President, at $400,000, is horribly underpaid. How many CEOs of even small companies make more than that? $400K to be under the pressure that comes with that position? Bothers me when I see how stupid some of my "friends" can be.

Random Pop Culture:

No show on TV right now comes anywhere close to Parks and Recreation. Maybe that'll change when Treme comes back in a couple of weeks, but just maybe. Tonight's episode was as good as a sitcom gets and it was just as good as any number of episodes of that show.
"So, not only does this thing exist, but you deprived these people of cake." -- Ron Swanson, talking about a vegetable loaf. One of a ton of great lines in tonight's Parks and Rec.
30 Rock has been up and down, but tonight's was up. Way up. Wouldn't be surprised if that becomes a trend with Tracy Morgan finally back. It takes pressure off of Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin to carry the show by themselves.

History:

On this day, ninety-nine years ago, the Titanic hit an iceberg. On this day, one hundred and forty-six years ago, Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth. Booth deprived us of our greatest president and how he may have handled Reconstruction. The iceberg made it possible for Celine Dion to make that song. Which was worse, I ask you?

And They Are Indisputable

2011-04-13T21:28:00.002-04:00

These are the facts:

It's interesting how Rob was such a good guy on Survivor: Heroes vs. Villians when he was pitted against Russell, but has gone back to his Machiavellian ways this season.
Dreading the impending Passover holiday. I prefer one day of no food to eight days of extreme restriction.
Finally time to watch hockey!
Still weeks away from the time to watch pro basketball!
People joke about how much the French love Jerry Lewis, but I've never seen anyone analyze it. My hypothesis is that they are so low on inhibitions compared to the Americans that they are non-chalant about many things that we find funny. So, being used to sex and their bodies, they have to find something else. Namely, the man who wrote The Day The Clown Cried (read about that here). They can have their Jerry Lewis and their lack of inhibition. I say: boobies and doody.

Seven Score And Ten Years Ago

2011-04-12T23:11:00.003-04:00

150 years ago at 4:30 A.M., the battery on Charleston's waterfront opened fire on Fort Sumter. By the end of the war that followed, one in every fifty Americans would be dead and one in every twenty-eight Americans would be a casualty of some sort. More Americans died in this war than in every other war the country has ever had, combined. It's the story of a people standing by the only way their economy worked, slavery, and rising up against their federal government. There's nothing heroic about that Lost Cause, nothing romantic. With the military technology outpacing the outdated military strategy, the battles turned into slaughters. With medicine not anywhere close to where it is today, wounds were not cared for correctly and infection was rampant. The Civil War is interesting because of what it tells us about the way our country struggled to go from a fledgling democracy to an established nation. It's interesting because its repercussions are still being felt in almost anything that happens nationally, from the Tea Party to the idea of a "Real America." It is not romantic.

But, before all of the carnage, the war started in the city that held the first secession convention, one of the most beautiful cities in the country. It started in the harbor in the picture above, in the fort you can see off in the distance.

Watch the full episode. See more Ken Burns.

Nada

2011-04-11T23:25:00.002-04:00

Wow. Nothing happened today other than a really lame How I Met Your Mother episode and, thanks to Vincent Gray getting arrested at a protest, the largest collection of "the bitch set me up" jokes in years. So, we'll stop there and wait for tomorrow. As I write this, it is 11:30PM on the east coast and we are five hours away from some sort of milestone or another. More to come on that.

Whippersnappers

2011-04-10T23:05:00.002-04:00

If you'll excuse the absence after a personally topsy-turvy week, I'll ease myself back in with a quick post on three movies I watched over the weekend:

Saw 127 Hours, making Black Swan the only of the Best Picture nominees I have yet to see. 127 Hours is, simply, a phenomenal movie. Beautiful camera work, exhilarating plot, great acting, very inspiring. "The scene" is very short and, for the most part, not that graphic. Loved it.

Mystery Team was a film at Sundance a couple of years ago, made by a comedy troupe from NYU that starred Donald Glover. The movie deals with three eighteen-year-olds who were one the Encyclopedia Browns of their neighborhood and are now called upon to solve a murder. Glover got the part on Community because of his work in this film and he more or less plays the same type of character. If you like the good portion of NBC's Thursday night shows -- and if you don't, how could you possibly read this blog -- you should like this movie.

With Sidney Lumet passing on Saturday, I took the opportunity to revisit his most famous movie, Network. Brilliant acting turns by Peter Finch, William Holden, and Faye Dunaway, and an Oscar-winning script highlight this look at the dirty business of television. People say that this plot, dealing with a faltering new division that turns its broadcast into entertainment to make money, prophesied the current state of TV news. That may be true, but I was also taken by how the movie proves that people will always overreact and think that their current situation is unique. The movie, made in 1976 (and how about the fact that four of the five Best Picture nominees in 1967 were this one, Rocky, All The President's Men, and Taxi Driver), has parts where Holden as the old-guard news producer rails about the younger generation and how they don't care about newspapers and will believe that anything on TV is real. Sound familiar? There is nothing new under the sun.

Blah-sketball

2011-04-05T08:30:00.001-04:00

In LA for the week and, since I'm not able to get around at all to go sightseeing (with the possible exception of walking down Rodeo Drive at some point or looking for the Peach Pit), I was really looking forwards to the National Championship game. That worked out, huh? Statistically, it really was among the two worst games ever. An awful ending to a fun tournament, as anti-climactic as it gets.

Worst of the Worst: #76, Johnson Family Vacation

2011-04-04T00:34:00.001-04:00

Cedric the Entertainer leads his family across the country to a family reunion. Wacky hijinks ensue. Bow Wow raps. It actually has a couple of laughs, but most of it is really, really stupid and it's boring enough that it feels like it is twice its actual length. The big mistake is that they couldn't rip off all of National Lampoon's Vacation, so they wound up with two half-movies, one about the road trip and one about sibling rivalry at the family reunion. It's disjointed and that makes it seem all the more tedious. Not one that's worth getting too worked up over.

Wordplay

2011-03-31T23:56:00.001-04:00

Prodigiously
Horrifically
Awesomely
Funny
Apocalyptically
Biblically
Epically
Unbelievably
Heart-stoppingly
Eye-gougingly
Ear-explodingly
Painfully

These are all adverbs to modify the word "bad" in the question: "How bad was tonight's musical episode of Grey's Anatomy?"

The Hammer Definitely Needs

2011-03-30T23:48:00.002-04:00

Random Pop Culture:

Matt is becoming one of the great heroes in Survivor history and he's only on for five minutes an episode! I can not wait for next week's episode to see how crazy it gets after he swats Sarita aside like the mentally-weak-reminds-everyone-of-a-bad-Kristen-Wiig-character player that she is.
Traffic Light has really come into its own as a very funny show, but they had to use an "It's complicated" Facebook relationship status joke? I actually spoke the punchline out loud before they said it.
Started watching The League, which is kind of like a dirtier and funnier Traffic Light. I have some issues with the constant continuity errors around the fantasy football, though, at least early in the first season.
Unsurprisingly, Lights Out will not be back for a second season, but that doesn't take away from what is airing. The finale should be phenomenal.

Opening Day:

It may be 35 degrees and raining outside, but tomorrow is Opening Day! Why they chose to do it on a Thursday is beyond me, but I'm excited! Some quick predictions.
Division winners: Boston, Minnesota, Texas, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, San Francisco
Wild cards: Yankees, Colorado
Sleepers: Colorado, Oakland
MVPs: Alex Rodriguez, Joey Votto
Cy Young: Felix Hernandez, Roy Halladay
World Series: Phillies over Red Sox

Random Music Video:

One heck of a day for birthdays today! You have Celine Dion, Norah Jones, and Eric Clapton. Oh, and this guy.

We Are The World

2011-03-29T22:49:00.002-04:00

The video from last night has me in a cartoon mode, but we live in more and more of a global society each day. It's just not fair to any international readers we may have to go crazy about cartoons I watched when I was growing up (or, sure, after I was grown up, at least physically). So, here are some non-English-speaker-friendly versions of some of my favorites.

People Just Liked It Better That Way

2011-03-28T23:54:00.004-04:00

The Monologue:

A cobra has disappeared in the Bronx Zoo. Duke and Scarlett have been detached to investigate.
An Egyptian cobra has gone missing from the reptile house in the Bronx Zoo. With its departure, the Egyptian cobra military is now in charge of the exhibit.
A snake went missing in the Bronx. Upon hearing there was a living thing in the Bronx that they hadn't tried out, the Yankees asked him to come in for a shot at being their fifth starter.

Random Pop Culture:

Nurse Jackie and United States of Tara return tonight. Nurse Jackie is in danger of going the Weeds route with me. It has three great performances, but the show itself is pretty boring because nobody ever learns anything or does anything different. On the other hand, Tara is constantly pushing itself (and also has great performances). I only watched Tara tonight and it was as good as it was at the end of its last season.
Luke of The Amazing Race may be my least favorite contestant ever. He is whiny to a level that Snooki finds annoying. Oh, I'm so sorry that you have it tough on a freaking game show where you get to travel around the world for free. I'm sure the 99.9% of applicants that don't get picked for the show really feel for you.
Don't look now, but House just literally bored someone to death. If only they had been more self-aware, they would have been able to diagnose the guy.
Am I crazy to think that Butler has the best shot of winning this thing? Really don't want to jinx them, though.

Random Music Video:

81 years ago today, the Turkish Postal Services Law was enacted and required that all foreign governments stop calling the country's largest city, the third largest city proper in the world, by its old name. But, why did Constantinople get the works? Let's see if we can find out!

Worst of the Worst: #83, Doogal

2011-03-27T23:30:00.002-04:00

America is so uncouth. Compared to our finer cousins on "The Continent" we are just a bunch of drawling hicks, like a less-gentlemanly Quincey Morris. Take, for instance, the French and British kids show, The Magic Roundabout. It's a show from the late '60s -- the British version was written and narrated by Emma Thompson's father -- shot in stop motion animation about a magical town with a magical carousel in its center and the adventures of a goofy but loyal dog, Dougal, who lived there. Years later, the French and then British made a computer-animated movie about the cartoon and the movie did quite well.

And here come those crappy Americans. Nobody here knows anything about the show, but the movie did well in the UK, so producers brought it over and redubbed it with mostly American actors. They carried over Kylie Minogue, Judi Dench, and Ian McKellen, but, for instance, replaced Bill Nighy with Jimmy Fallon and Ray Winstone with Bill Hader. Good omen, right? Plus, because nobody here knew the story, they were able to stray from the earnestness of the kids show (yay!) and make it a bunch of inappropriate pop culture references and fart sound effects. A kids movie where every line is taken from Pulp Fiction? Yes, please!

It's this dialogue and this lack of care about the source material that dooms the movie. You don't want to blame the voice talent like Whoopi Goldberg and William H. Macy and John Stewart, but they seem to reading the lines in a total vacuum. There is no emotional connection and it is obvious. You end up with a bunch of stuff happening that you can't possibly care about and that makes this boring. Really, really boring. Had to rewind a few times because I drifted into a daydream and missed a plot point. Easily the worst kids movie I've ever seen and it holds the record for lowest-grossing computer animated film ever (I learned in reading about that that the average computer animated kids movie makes around $130 million!). I imagine some kids might like a dog that eats lots of candy or a snail and cow being in love with each other, but if my kid is going to like weird stuff, it's going to be at least well-made. I've never seen an episode of the Steve Carrell The Office because I'm too much of a snob about the British one. I'm passing that snobbery on, no matter how American my kid is.

Dook

2011-03-25T00:17:00.002-04:00

You ever seen a Duke team look so bad in the tournament? The only thing that came to mind was 2003 in Redick's freshman year when they lost to the Heinrich-Collison Kansas team and JJ kept missing and missing, but it turns out they lost by 4. They just got run off the floor tonight. I pumped up Derrick Williams and now you know why.

Dancing

2011-03-21T22:20:00.002-04:00

Hard to say that, even with the upsets, there were many surprises in the first two rounds of the tournament.

You can't really count Marquette, Butler, or Florida State as Cinderella teams. Two are from major conferences and the other is one of the top programs in the country.
The Big East choked, especially Pittsburgh and Notre Dame. What's new?
Ditto Purdue and Texas.
BYU is much better than many people (not me) thought, but it's not like they haven't been top ten all year.

Yes, it's weird that Kansas is in a regional with three double-digit seeds and, yes, a lot of the weekend's games came down to the last seconds. But surprising? I have all of my Final Four left. The ones who don't are the ones who believed in Pitt, Notre Dame, and Syracuse. What's surprising to me is that people would do that.

Worst of the Worst: #85, Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector

2011-03-20T23:55:00.002-04:00

Look, what do you want me to say? It's full of racism, fart sound effects, poop jokes, and bad acting. It's like Police Academy for dumber people than the ones who love the Police Academy sequels. On the good side, it's the best of the "Larry the Cable Guy" movies because I snorted once at something or another. Still not sure why he didn't play a cable guy in any of his three movies that were on this list. At least I never have to watch another Dan Whitney movie again*.

*Until his next movie ends up on the next worst of the worst list.

Let's Dance

2011-03-16T22:30:00.002-04:00

Halftime of a horribly-played 22-22 VCU-USC game as I wonder if it's too late to give Harvard or St. Mary's a call to show up on Friday, but it's time to take one last look at my brackets as we get rolling tomorrow:

Biggest seed upset: #13 Belmont over #4 Wisconsin, of course. Belmont led the nation in scoring margin, a key stat. Wisconsin scored 33 against Penn State the other day and lost by 30 to Ohio State in their last game of the regular season.
The classic 12-5 upsets: I have three. Maybe I shouldn't pick Richmond after they didn't show up last year, but I don't like inconsistent teams like Vanderbilt unless they've done something in the tournament before. Clemson looked great last night, but I had them beating WVU before that. I've already written about why Utah State is underseeded.
Lowest seed in the Sweet 16: #12 Utah State, again.
Lowest seed in the Elite 8: #7 Washington. A little biased because I've loved their style of play for some time, but I wouldn't love it if it didn't lead to success.
Best player you've never heard of: Derrick Williams (F, Arizona). Jared Sullinger can still up his stock, but Williams is the first pick in the draft as of right now. He looks the most like an NBA player of anyone I've seen this year.
Best player you have heard of: Jimmer. You're going to hear his name a lot for the next few weeks.
Worst #1: Pittsburgh.
Worst #1 with a ridiculously easy region: Pittsburgh.
#1 most likely to choke: Pittsburgh, barely beating Ohio State.
My wrong Final Four: Ohio State, Duke, Kansas, and BYU (AKA, anyone but Pittsburgh).
My national champion that I hate myself for picking but I can't deny that they are the favorites even though I hope they blow it and I lose: Duke.

And They Are Indisputable (NCAA Tournament Edition)

2011-03-15T00:27:00.002-04:00

These are the facts (okay, maybe bold assertions) with the brackets out:

People talk about Colorado not making the tournament, but the biggest errors the tournament committee made are in the seeding. There are teams that are very underseeded and some that are very overseeded. The #17 team in one of the polls as a 12-seed? One of the seven best teams in the country as a 4-seed? A team that finished 9th in its conference as a 3-seed? The 18th or 19th best team in the country as a 2-seed?
Utah State isn't slightly better than Kansas State. Utah State is way better than Kansas State. Utah State is 7th in scoring margin and Kansas State is 57th. Utah State is the 7th most experienced team in the nation and Kansas State is the 245th. This won't even be an upset.
They are really good offensively, but Oakland is the most overrated (by the media) of the double-digit seeds. Texas probably deserves Florida 2-seed (as does BYU). You're going to hear about how the Longhorns fell apart down the stretch. Yes, they lost some games and then they fell apart right to the Big 12 title game. Nobody who is "falling apart" gets to the end in a conference that deep. Oakland could beat a lot of high seeds in this field. Texas isn't one of them.
The Big East was the best conference, obviously. Second was the Big Ten and third the Big 12. Which was the fourth best conference in the country this year? Had to be the ACC, right? No? Well, the Pac-10 then? SEC? It was the Mountain West. The MWC had the fourth highest RPI of any league this season. If you want to write off San Diego State, BYU, and UNLV, do it at your own risk. In fact, I think San Diego State has the easiest road to the Elite 8 of any 1- or 2-seed.
But that must mean I think UConn is horribly overrated? I do. They finished 9th in their conference. They are a one-man team. I don't buy the Big East hype. East Coast bias may be a way of life in baseball, but it's a tradition in college basketball. Those Pac-10, MWC, and WAC teams are always among the lowest-picked when you look at percentages in the bracket contests. And then they win, imagine that.
And that East Coast bias leads to this: Washington is maybe the most underrated team in the field. They're not just underrated as a 7-seed that won their conference tournament and is getting back their best defender after he didn't play. They are as good as 2-seed North Carolina. Yes, I mean that. Jeff Sagarin, in his predictive ratings, has the Huskies as the 10th best team in the country compared to the Tarheels at 15th. Ken Pomeroy has the Tarheels 14th and the Huskies 15th. The Huskies are the 111th most experienced team in the country, the Tarheels the 323rd. Washington is 8th in scoring margin, Carolina is 29th. Want to look past the numbers? Washington's point guard is better than Carolina's. They have more big bodies inside, including a better post presence in Matthew Bryan-Amaning. Which 2-seed do I have going out first?
My Final Four? I don't have it set yet. It's really hard not to like all of the #1s, if only because Pitt has such an easy road. Won't be all #1s. So will it be Syracuse or Washington beating out Ohio State? Will it be Old Dominion or Butler making Cinderella runs. Will Jimmer shoot the Cougars to glory? Will Texas or San Diego State (who should have had Pitt's 1-seed) knock off Duke? Will Kansas choke like last year or will Purdue, on a mission, take them out? I know which 1-seed I like the best to make the Final Four. I know which team I have winning it all. I have to fill in the rest.

Worst of the Worst: #87, Testosterone

2011-03-13T23:28:00.002-04:00

How's this for a story? A comic book artist meets and falls in love with a man, who leaves him abruptly and with HIV. The artist goes on a search through the gay community of Southern California as the book exposes some of the seedier aspects. Maybe it's not my cup of tea, but it sounds like an interesting enough story.

This movie, based on the book of the same name that had that story, changes that slightly. Okay, more than slightly. The artist does not have HIV -- just a broken heart -- and goes on a search through Buenos Aires to find his lover. The lover's family is hiding him so the artist fights against them and meets a mysterious woman and her brother who may or may not be able to help him.

The odds are a lot lower, of course, in the movie version and the obsession with finding the lover is also not quite as clear. Therein lies the biggest fault with this movie that nobody has ever heard of and made just less than $30,000 in its one weekend in theaters. There never seems to be a good reason for anything the main character does, so he just sort of moves aimlessly around Buenos Aires until the ultimate twist that left me going to Google because I didn't understand how it ended. Confusing plot and bad dialogue punctuated by multiple meaningless-to-the-plot sex scenes? Sounds like porn to me. Thankfully (for me), it was not graphic and mostly just guys running around with their shirts off. The direction is poor and the editing is especially bad, with scenes starting and stopping what seems like a second too early or too late. I've found in a lot of these movies that bad editing can make the difference between something being boring and incompetent.

The acting is actually mostly okay. David Sutcliffe, the "star," was a regular on Gilmore Girls and Private Practice and he's not bad. The main female actress, an Argentinian named Celina Font, is very good. The acting is enough to ensure that the movie is not so much awful as just meandering, incomprehensible, and ultimately forgettable.

(Tourney breakdown to come tomorrow.)

And They Are Indisputable

2011-03-10T00:00:00.003-05:00

These are the facts:

The British show The IT Crowd is really, really funny. A wacky sitcom about two nerds and their just-a-bit-too-desperate female boss. I generally don't like shows with laugh tracks, but it doesn't bother me here too much (maybe I've been softened up by How I Met Your Mother).
Traffic Light on Fox started out okay, but has gotten quite funny over the last few episodes. They nail some guy things, a notable one being a story about the morning commute as alone time.
No teams of note in the tourney tonight, though a couple of good ones yesterday with Oakland (high-scoring with a legit NBA prospect in the post) and Butler. As always, loving the amount of basketball available between various channels and ESPN3, especially the always entertaining Pac-10 tournament on CSN.
Wisconsin came in at #18 in my state rankings of a couple of years ago. Seeing what is going on there makes me feel all the more fortunate to live in as deep blue a state as I do.
It's quite likely that my daughter will grow up never knowing that Color Me Badd ever existed, unless I do something about it. My duty, right?

They're Playing Bas-ket-ball

2011-03-07T23:49:00.001-05:00

My favorite sports week of the year, Championship Week, is well in motion and a few dark horses are already dancing. Belmont lost one game in conference and won its others by an average of 22 points. They are explosive offensively and look to be on that magical 12 or 13 line. ODU comes from the CAA, one of the best mid-major conferences on a yearly basis. Wofford is veteran and almost won their game last year as a 14. Gonzaga got in tonight and they're always a threat, especially with their interior size.

Butler will join the field tomorrow night and the 500-team Big East tournament kicks off during the day. Very much looking forward to UConn and St. John's losing in the first round of the NCAAs.

Worst of the Worst: #89, Basic Instinct 2

2011-03-06T21:48:00.002-05:00

And so we reach the 3/4 pole of this now fifteen-month race to watch Rotten Tomatoes' hundred worst movies of the "Aughts" with a pretty infamously bad movie. The movie was a flop of epic proportions. The original Basic Instinct cost $40 million to make and brought in $117 million at the box office, to go with countless video tape viewings (including the single most paused moment in movie history). The sequel cost $70 million and made $5 million. I didn't leave a number out there. Why did it bomb so badly? Fourteen years had passed, meaning people didn't care so much about the "franchise" and Sharon Stone was perceived as maybe a little old to be playing Catherine Tramell again; Stone had fallen off the map a bit, having had not a really big box office kind of role since the not-so-good Sphere eight years earlier; word of mouth from the critics was abysmal. An infamously bad movie, which is why what I'm about to say may come as a surprise.

With two exceptions, Basic Instinct 2 is a perfectly average movie.

The plot deals with one of London's leading psychiatrists who is called in to do a forensic evaluation of Ms. Tramell after her boyfriend is killed in a car accident while she was driving. A cop, knowing that she had a history of writing about murders that somehow happen, is out to get her and tries to get the psychiatrist to convince the court that she is a danger to herself and others. While the interview goes on, the femme fatale uses her sexed-up manipulation on him and he begins to be obsessed with her. When she is freed on a technicality, he fantasizes about her and follows her around and then the people close to him start turning up dead. Mystery, sex, twist, blah blah blah. Your average Cinemax movie. Maybe one scene of really graphic sex and a few other semi-graphic ones, plus a little blood. David Morrissey's performance as the shrink isn't too bad. David Thewlis as the cop is mostly quite good (not a surprise, since he's pretty good as Lupin in the Harry Potter films). Bad, boring, uninventive plot. Just average.

The first exception to this is the dialogue. It is not good. One of the first lines is when Tramell's boyfriend is in the car at the beginning and drugged up. He says, "I can't move." She replies, "You don't have to. You're in a car." Plenty of other lines that are as intellectually stimulating. The movie also attempts to set a Guiness world record for most times the word "come" (in various spellings, I'm sure) is spoken in a movie. It's not suggestive. It's just overused. The script gets so bad that the movie is funny at times. That's not so bad, I guess, in so boring a film. Add to that some unintentional comedy in the overdramatic acting job that Thewlis does in his death scene and, while bad, the dialogue is sort of entertaining. Which means it can only be the second exception that makes the movie truly awful.

That second exception is the acting job turned in by Sharon Stone. In watching these bad movies, the two worst acting jobs I've seen by a well-known actor have been from Chris Klein (his laugh-out-loud performance in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li) and John Travolta (from Battlefield Earth, of course). Add Stone to the list as the worst actress so far. It's not how she tries to look much younger than she is, including a shot of her really, really (I could keep going there) bad boob job. It's about how she delivers her lines. She's supposed to be sexy but cold, sarcastic but enticing. Instead, she speaks every word as if she's reading them for the first time and she can barely read. She's saying things for shock value, but they are so unbelievable that you have to roll your eyes. It's not so bad that it's funny. It's so bad that you want her to get off screen as quickly as possible. We're talking about an Academy Award-nominated actress, maybe the biggest sex symbol of the '90s, and I cringed every time she opened her mouth. She's not the first actor to ruin a (barely) legacy. She's not even the first actor from Casino, since Pesci and De Niro have been making stinker after stinker for a while now. I guess it's sad that she ended up in a movie that sat on a shelf for six years and was embroiled in lawsuits before being made, a movie that doesn't even really have anything to do with the first one other than a scene where Tramell looks at an icepick. Maybe we -- or at least those very, very few of us who saw this movie -- should remember her for Casino or Total Recall, but it can only be so sad because she brought this on herself. A good performance from her would not have saved this movie, but it would have saved it from being near-unwatchable.

Worst of the Worst: #75, Son Of The Mask

2011-03-05T22:04:00.002-05:00

Son of the Mask is well-known as one of the worst movies in recent memory. It has a lot of things going for/against it in terms of low quality. It stars Jamie Kennedy. That's a huge one. It involves an inordinate amount of really, really poor CGI. It prominently features fart and urine jokes and has someone getting hit in the nuts within the first thirty seconds of the film. It was written by someone who wrote for the extraordinarily short-lived The Chevy Chase Show. The plot doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. It's overly schmaltzy at times. It's a sequel to a not-so-classic movie that came out ten years earlier. Kal Penn uses a really fake Indian accent in it. Steven Wright is the fourth-billed person in the movie. And much, much more! Not so long into the movie, probably when Kennedy puts on the mask and does a big, crappy musical number, I got excited by the prospect that Son of the Mask could seriously pose a threat to Master of Disguise as the single least entertaining movie I've ever seen. It is really a miserable piece of garbage.

But...

(No, I'm not about to say that there is any redeeming quality, just counting off excuses.)

I can't put this movie in that company. It's probably not even the second-least entertaining movie I've watched on this list; that may fall to Jenny McCarthy's Dirty Love, which beat Son of the Mask for Worst Picture at 2006's Razzie Awards. There are a few reasons why I bump this one up a little. First, it's a kid's movie, which automatically means I'm only going to get it but so much. Yes, this is also true of Master of Disguise, but that one is a little too dirty to not be trying to get adults and also you probably have never seen Master of Disguise, so trust me. Second, I don't think the original The Mask would be nearly as popular if it came out in the last five or six years as it was when it came out seventeen years ago. Comedy is just different. Maybe this doesn't say anything for the newer movie, but I take it into account. Third, my expectations for it were so exaggerated that it could have never lived down to them.

So, in closing, Son of the Mask is not the least entertaining movie I've ever seen. So it has that going for it, which is nice.

Nut 'N' Honey

2011-03-04T00:21:00.001-05:00

Let's be honest, there's nothing going on as far as this blog is concerned. No new TV tonight. The calm before the Championship Week storm. Charlie Sheen jokes are already old. Wisconsin isn't so funny (unless you're pointing out how "gritty" and "fundamentally-sound" their basketball team is). So I'll have two bad movies (classic ones) for you over the weekend. Bi-winning. See what I mean?

Working With Quacktors

2011-03-02T22:08:00.001-05:00

Two short films I made, based on a series of pictures someone took. First story written by the photographer. Second re-cut by me.

Winning

2011-02-28T22:00:00.003-05:00

The Monologue:

The Clippers are celebrating Black History Month. On the day after tomorrow.
Charlie Sheen says that he's not high on anything except Charlie Sheen. He went to the hospital after buying some Charlie Sheen which turned out to be a "Hot Shot". Get it?
See, your little mind thinks my joke is bad and all I think about is winning.

Random Pop Culture:

Didn't watch much of the Oscars because other people in my house do not appreciate my constant mockery. Instead, watched an Amazing Race result that wasn't fixed but could have been based on the team that left and what I assume is everyone's indifference. Also, an episode of Big Love that I barely paid attention to because I was reading Oscar jokes on Twitter and the show is mostly boring lately. Was I happy with who won the awards? Who cares. I know what I liked and that's fine for me.
How I Met Your Mother is pretty hit-or-miss of late, but tonight's was hit. The dog stuff was great and the "sandwich" gag is always a winner.
To say I don't care about House anymore would be to say that Qadafi is having some troubles in his country. I am flamingly apathetic.
Somehow, I've found myself watching the final season of Heroes on Netflix Watch Instantly. It's quite a bit better than I thought it would be, but obviously too little, too late.

Random Webpage:

Brian Jones would have 69 today, but of course he died 42 years ago. Anyway, he played on this song, among other hits from whatever band this is.

Worst of the Worst: #56, Because I Said So

2011-02-27T22:43:00.003-05:00

You start with four actresses -- Diane Keaton, Mandy Moore, Lauren Graham, and Piper Perabo -- who we rather like. But then it turns out they have no chemistry at all as a mom and her three daughters, because who would believe that those three could be sisters? And then you make the movie slapstick and have Keaton, who I might remind you had feature roles in The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and Annie Hall, do all kinds of really stupid things. You have two likeable male leads in Tom Everett Scott and Stephen Collins, but you have a third in Gabriel Macht who is just not a good actor and give all three of them bad lines. You top it off with an unbelievable story and have multiple times that the four women sing together for no apparent reason and, voila, you have crap.

Moore plays a baker -- and to paraphrase Anton Chekhov, if a cake appears early in a stupid movie you know it's going into someone's face later on -- who is unlucky at love. Her sisters are both married, but she can't seem to find anyone. I guess it's because she is supposed to have some weird quirks, but it's Mandy Moore. Who doesn't find her cute? Their mother is divorced and living vicariously through her daughters -- who share way too much sexual info with each other -- and wants to make them happy by attempting to control every little part of their lives. She puts a personal ad in the paper and interviews men to date her single daughter, picking one and then helping him win her daughter's heart behind her back. In a weird plot twist that nobody could see coming, the daughter meets another guy who is both cute and free-wheeling. Which guy will the daughter choose and will her mother let her choose the one she wants? And will she find out about the personal ad in a dramatic scene that leads to a fight and people leaving answering machine messages when other people won't pick up the phone and eventual reconciliation while the daughter falls in love with whom she wants even though the guy she falls in love with finds out she's dating someone else and gets angry at her but then tries to get her back with a cute speech in a public setting that leads to them kissing and everyone clapping? Well, you'll just have to watch to find out.

And so Diane Keaton, she of the Godfather movies and a Best Actress winner for Annie Hall, ends up making sex jokes and wiping cake frosting off of her face. And Macht, Moore, and Keaton are all asked to deliver heartfelt speeches that are written very, very poorly. And the women sing together for no reason, but we're supposed to find it cute even though Moore's voice is a million times better than the other three's and they don't even that out so it sounds weird. So there you have the movie considered by many to be the worst movie of 2007. And it's really bad. But, somehow, I can't totally hate every second because I really do like the four actresses, especially Moore. Casting can't make a bad movie good -- though it can make a good movie like The Fighter very good -- but it can keep a movie from being unwatchable. So, Eyde Belasco -- who, by the way, cast a few other of these horrible movies but also did two great, great casting jobs in Half Nelson and (500) Days of Summer -- we salute you.

Blerg

2011-02-24T23:24:00.002-05:00

I'd have had a lot more to say twenty or so minutes ago, but then I watched 30 Rock. On a night when I finally admitted that Parks and Recreation had jumped Community as the funniest non-Curb show, I had to wonder if the former champ, 30 Rock, had finally begun to jump the shark. It's just really, really awful. The writers and Kenneth are destroying everything in their path, even being unfunny enough tonight to make Liz unfunny. Impressive as that may be, I wonder how they can salvage it unless they go all Liz and Jack for the rest of the season.

Octarocks And Whatnot

2011-02-23T21:13:00.002-05:00

The Monologue:

The Legend of Zelda was released twenty-five years ago on Monday. One of the greatest video game franchises ever. We salute a quarter century of people hitting the sword button to make it look like Link was flashing the screen and twenty-three years of nobody beating Zelda II.
As if you needed any other proof that Mariah Carey is a force for pure evil.
First Carmelo Anthony goes to the Knicks then Deron Williams goes to the Nets. Now Wyoming has traded its entire population of sixteen people for two dogs from Connecticut and a fetus to be named later.

Random Pop Culture:

This promises to be one of the great seasons of Survivor. There are interesting personalities, shifty dealings from day one, and Russell starting to go crazy.
A quick search shows that I have so far neglected to sing the praises of Science Channel's An Idiot Abroad. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant send the center of their jokes, Karl Pilkington, around the globe to see the Seven Wonders and experience the local cultures. Pilkington is funny. Watching a woman eat a scorpion in China, he wonders what goes through her mind when she sees a spider in her bathroom. Seeing the Taj Mahal and learning that a man built it for his wife, Pilkington wonders what the man must have done to have to build that to get in good graces. The show can be found in On Demand.

Random Video:

Starting to feel new music a bit. Got the Cee Lo album and just stole a copy of Mumford & Sons from the wife. They are a British folk band with a great sound. Here is the song they played on the Grammys.

The Internet Makes No Sense

2011-02-22T22:51:00.002-05:00

The Monologue:

I went to walk the dog this morning, not realizing that the Knicks had traded him to Denver along with fourteen players, thirty draft picks, and the entire population of Staten Island.
Is there any more relieved person in the world right now than Hosni Mubarak? "I'm not that bad, guys, seriously."
Rush Limbaugh called Michelle Obama overweight. Not to be outdone, Sarah Palin called her stupid.

Random Pop Culture:

Traffic Light had a nice bit about a guy treasuring his morning commute as alone time, but I call foul on a bit where a guy got a girl's phone number for ostensibly professional reasons and looked all over for a pen to write it down. Does anyone do that anymore? You don't just put it right into your phone?
I really, really like Lights Out -- the writing is great and Reg E. Cathey puts on an acting clinic -- but the boxing action in tonight's episode was super fake. Way too many clean head shots; the ref would have stopped the fight if anyone left themselves that undefended for that long. The action especially looked fake after the beautifully-shot action in The Fighter.
Indeed, saw The Fighter, the eighth of the Best Picture nominees that I've seen. Pretty good movie, though far from great. There are a few very weak moments here and there, though, like many sports movies, the great ending helps you the remember the movie fondly. I think I'd find it a pretty average movie without Christian Bale's tour de force performance as a crack-addled brother lying to himself and his family about his addiction and the toll it has taken on his life. He's a shoo-in for the Oscar. I also really, really liked Amy Adams as the tough girlfriend who helps Mark Wahlberg start to get his act together. Who I didn't like? Melissa Leo, who has gotten such great press and the Oscar nomination. I didn't like her accent and she seemed to be a caricature that didn't really add anything to the movie.
All eight of the Best Picture nominees that I've seen have been at least very good. I'd probably rank them right now as: 8) The Kids Are All Right; 7) Winter's Bone; 6) The Fighter; 5) Inception (saw it a second time recently and it didn't hold up as well); 4) True Grit (now convinced Hailee Steinfeld needs to win Best Supporting Actress); 3) The Social Network (plan on seeing it again very soon); 2) Toy Story 3; 1)The King's Speech. It's not close, by the way. The King's Speech is way, way, way, way, way, way, etc. better than everything else.

Random Webpage:

And I mean random. It's inexplicable, but I laughed out loud. First go all the way down the page and click to play the theme song. Then, enjoy "Selleck Waterfall Sandwich".

Can You Imagine Bouncing A Check To Kunta Kinte?

2011-02-17T23:32:00.002-05:00

The Monologue:

Fox News doctors footage. I, for one, am shocked. Seriously though, it's not like we're not asking for Fox and MSNBC to be what they are. People watch for entertainment and they deliver.
There's plenty of stuff out there for people who are unfamiliar with technology (take The Social Network, for example) and the way that stuff deals with the technology makes me laugh. Not sure when to text? Let your spirit guides at match.com tell you!
I'm realizing this has gotten away from being a monologue and is more just random links again.

Random Pop Culture:

Community overall was great with its stylistic satire of The Office/Parks and Rec/Modern Family, but the real joy was Donald Glover. His fake cry is funnier than anyone else's. Fans of the Mike O'Meara Show will especially appreciate the use of the Reading Rainbow theme song in tonight's episode.
Straight men can't go funny in every episode, but if you use them sparingly, the times they do go funny is extra funny. Witness Adam Scott on Parks and Recreation tonight, who has been bone dry in both of his major roles so far (the other being Party Down) but was absolutely crazy in this most recent episode.
No matter how well it came together at one point tonight, I'm this close to just fast-forwarding through any 30 Rock scene that doesn't feature Liz or Jack.
Tonight, a character on Grey's Anatomy was excited about tickets to the Huskies game, proclaiming, "It's the title game of the Pac-10 tournament! If they win, they get an automatic bid to March Madness!" A) the Pac-10 tournament is always at Staples Center. B) Nobody talks about a "bid to March Madness." If "NCAA Tournament" or "the Tournament" are copyrighted, just don't bother talking about that in the show. Instead, they lost me early in what turned out to be a pretty good episode.

Random Video:

Today's birthdays include Billie Joe Armstrong and Paris Hilton. With all due respect to Green Day, nobody really cares about seeing a video from either of them, right?

39 Days, 18 Contestants, 15 Contestants Who Understand The Game

2011-02-16T22:11:00.003-05:00

The Monologue:

The National Enquirer reported that O.J. Simpson was beat up in prison. It hit Twitter and major blogs wrote about it. Problem: it didn't actually happen. The other prisoners were 100% not guilty.
The theme song to Civilization IV won a Grammy award. Everyone thought the speech was two minutes long, but it turns out that they had been listening to it for four hours.
This just sounds like a horrible, horrible idea. Horrible.

Random Pop Culture:

Survivor returned tonight with the premiere of its twenty-second installment. It started out promising and ended up being one of the more frustrating episodes I can remember. I lamented the way that the ubiquitous hidden immunity idol has changed the game for the worse, but it turned out that it led to one of the dumber set of moves in the history of the game. There's a reason you don't make power moves in the first few days.
Man, Lights Out is just really, really good. I guess FX and AMC are just willing to take more chances, but the quality of shows on those networks is far, far above the quality on the broadcast networks.
Albert Pujols is not signing with anyone but St. Louis. Please, let's stop the madness. It's not going to happen.

Random Video:

Birthday for James Ingram, who sang this duet with Linda Ronstadt.

Dog Days

2011-02-15T23:14:00.002-05:00

The Monologue:

Billy Ray Cyrus is concerned that the people around his daughter Miley are putting her on the wrong track. So are we, Dad. So are we.
Haley Barbour is under fire because he will not denounce a proposal in Mississippi to have a vanity plate honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the KKK. I have less of a problem with the KKK part than with the Confederate soldier part. Of course, the plate is being pushed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, one of the foremost Lost Cause organizations. The KKK we know and love now does not have the same goals that Forrest's original group did, but the dude was a traitor to the country.
I have very few limits when it comes to what I could potentially find funny, but I just can not laugh at the Serene Branson thing. Not being sarcastic there; I seriously just do not find it funny at all.

Random Pop Culture:

Getting quite a bit bored with House. Not sure why, because it's the same formula as always, but I guess I'm just tired of it.
Right now, the only network drama that even sniffs the list of best shows on TV is The Chicago Code. House is boring and Grey's Anatomy has gotten really, really soapy again. Actually, dramas are pretty bad in general right now with Big Love being spotty, at best. The only other drama I'm currently on is Lights Out, easily the best drama currently airing and the only thing challenging Community and Parks and Recreation for the overall top spot.
I've now seen two episodes of Fox's new romantic comedy, Traffic Light. It has its moments, which is more than you can say about any Fox sitcom since, what, Bernie Mac? Fox and sitcoms do not go well together.

Random Video:

I am eschewing '80s and '90s music with the baby for '60s music. Much less hit-and-miss on the "best of the decade" station. This is what she fell asleep to last night. You think Drake or Willow Smith or Esperanza Spalding, whoever they all are, will ever write something like this?

Out Of Touch

2011-02-14T21:40:00.003-05:00

The Grammys are not for me, and I'm okay with that:

I have never heard of Esperanza Spalding and I'm still not convinced that she wasn't some audience member that someone called up so they didn't have to give an award to Justin Bieber.
I've never heard an Arcade Fire song and they'd probably annoy me if I did because it's probably just another band that sounds like the Shins or some older alt-rock group.
The Lady Antebellum song is just fine, but I hate the name of the group and I don't especially like country music, even if it's fake country music that's really pop.
I bought four albums all of last year (like the year matters since "Need You Now" was released in 2009): Eminem, Kanye, Ben Folds/Nick Hornby, and the Treme soundtrack. I'm not interested in trying anything by anybody new. Nobody's going to make a song better than half of Stevie Wonder's catalog from the '60s and '70s anyway.
If you had told me five years ago that a guy who looks like Tony Gwynn would dress up like Elton John in a chicken suit and sing a song with Gwyneth Paltrow, I'd slowly back away. (Granted, that song is really good, even if I hate censorship.)
Someone today told me I really needed to see the performance with Usher, Bieber, and Jaden Smith. I slowly backed away.
The Grammys are not for me. I didn't watch a second until I found low-quality YouTube videos of Eminem's and Cee-Lo's performances. Wasn't Adam Levine supposed to be with Eminem at some point? I only saw Rihanna and some other chick who I have no idea who she is. My annoyance with the state of music is making my grammar bad.
In closing, we should rename the Grammys into "The Music White People Like Awards". Thank you for your time.

Worst of the Worst: #46, Material Girls

2011-02-13T00:00:00.002-05:00

So I found myself at 11PM on a Saturday night, watching a Hilary/Haylie Duff movie and wondering where my life went so wrong. I just wanted to get through this list of the hundred worst movies, only twenty-nine to go including this one, but I sat in front of the TV, my brain slowly melting and leaking from every orifice on my face. The Duff sisters not even trying to act, Brent Spiner showing up again as a bad guy (as he did in The Master of Disguise), Anjelica Huston somehow being on the screen. Everything had gone so very, very wrong.

The Duffs play sisters who are heiresses to a cosmetic fortune. When their company comes under fire for doing something bad that could have easily been disproved by a monkey, they lose all of their money and have to clear their names. They do something or other wacky to expose the bad guy and everything's great. They learn an important lesson: money is more important than anything else! That may not be what the movie is trying to do, but that's what it succeeds at. The big fear the sisters face is that they'll have to sell the company for $60 million each. Instead, they not only end up successful, but they take a guy who works at the free legal society and turn him into their corporate lawyer.

And so I watched this slapstick mess of stupidity -- lines that fail as laugh lines are often accompanied by wacky sound effects -- that I had DVR-ed off of MTV and wondered, not for the first time, why I was doing this. But then, it ended. I survived. So, eh. On to the next one.

Reality

2011-02-11T00:52:00.002-05:00

Good Community, great Parks and Recreation (Nick Offerman was brilliant, as always, but Aziz Ansari had some great physical moments), pretty good 30 Rock, but there's something more important eating at me.

Public demonstrations can be awe-inspiring and the yearning of a people for freedom is admirable. But if history has shown anything, it is that people with power don't want to give up that power and that revolutions are rarely, if ever, without a lot of bloodshed. That's just human nature, really.

Random Items

2011-02-09T23:37:00.002-05:00

Some quick housekeeping, as I try my hardest to get through the short February doldrums until baseball springs anew and March Madness gets here:

I think very few of the very few people who read this blog watch just about anything I watch on TV (which is actually not very much these days). The first of two links from Details magazine, this one about my current second-favorite sitcom and the wacky murals that they often show.
The second article is an oral history of a great show that I know nobody watched, Party Down. Shame.
A show people probably do watch is How I Met Your Mother and Monday's episode had a whole hidden scheme working for it. I'm going to go home and sleep with my wife!
Finally, I neglected to review the seventh of the Best Picture nominees I've seen, The King's Speech. The only word to describe it is "beautiful." So beautiful that it wasn't just the ending that had me near tears, it was random scenes because they are so well done artistically. The acting is beyond superb for the most part, with Colin Firth about to deservedly run away with the Oscar and Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter also nominated for good reason. The "most part" comes in because the actor who plays Churchill is a bit weak, but it's a very small part. The dialogue is wonderful, the art direction is sublime, the subtleties of the direction are great (I particularly loved something that Rush does at the end, a slight tilt of his head that carries a message). Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Easily the best movie of the year.

No, The Almost-Six-Month-Old Didn't Understand What "Tin Roof, Rusted" Meant In Context Either

2011-02-07T22:17:00.003-05:00

The Monologue:

Really awkward moment when the Steelers got all the way back to Pittsburgh before realizing they had left Troy Polamalu in Dallas. They just assumed he had been invisible on the plane the way he had been during the game.
I'm not saying the halftime show was so bad as to be offensive, but the FCC has now overreacted by banning music from the radio.
Did you love that Super Bowl commercial? You know, the one where a guy acted stupid and the smarter woman made fun of him while an animal did something that was supposed to be funny while everyone danced gingerly around racial stereotypes? You liked that one, right?

Random Pop Culture:

She didn't do a great acting job, but the weirdest thing about Katy Perry being on How I Met Your Mother tonight to me was that she's just too hot for that show. Not that the women on the show aren't attractive, but they're more real-life cute and she just didn't fit in.
To the show's credit, though, as bad as some of the telephone gags at Marshall's house were, the last scene with Ted and Zoe in the hallway was phenomenal.
The Chicago Code could be pretty good. Decent pilot with some good moments and the always great job turned in by Delroy Lindo. Shows promise.

Random Video:

From the "Song To Which The Baby Fell Asleep" Dept. What can I say? The kid likes her pop.

Timely

2011-02-04T00:30:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I said that Community was the best thing going right now, which was fortuitous timing as they dropped the "comedy episode to beat" for 2011 tonight. Extraordinarily funny all of the way through and, unlike many episodes, it is totally standalone, so you can catch it on Hulu having not seen any other episode and still get it. The group plays Dungeons & Dragons to save a life.

Bing

2011-02-02T22:58:00.002-05:00

The Monologue:

Good news: the groundhog didn't see his shadow, so Spring is around the corner. Bad news: he took a wrong turn going back to his hole and froze to death in a four-foot-deep snow bank.
Speaking of Groundhog Day, here's a cute little piece from the guy who played Ned. Ned? Ned Ryerson?
Hate absolutes. I can't believe that all of the violence is originating with the pro-government faction in Egypt. Not all of the protesters are saints. We're not talking Gandhi here.

Random Pop Culture:

With most of the best cable shows in between seasons right now and nothing -- nothing -- very worthwhile drama-wise on network (even House has been pretty weak lately), FX's Lights Out is far and away the best drama on the air right now. It is gut-wrenching, well-acted, and the fight scene in this week's episode was jaw-droppingly intense.
Best single thing on the air right now? I guess Community, though the most recent installment of Showtime's Episodes was brilliant and no show right now is better at doing what it sets out to do than Archer.
Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter posed a great question in a column: what is the most obscure thing you watch on TV? Mine is probably History Detectives on PBS, since the only other non-primetime show I watch the most is the overly popular Pawn Stars.
February means we're getting close to March. Maryland just doesn't have the go-to guy to hang with a team like Duke, so I have to look elsewhere. Back in November, I gave you San Diego State as a sleeper and they just finally lost this week. The team they lost to, BYU, has the single best player in the nation -- and most exciting to watch -- in point guard Jimmer Fredette. I may have been a bit off on Michigan State, huh? Though they tend to be different come tournament time.

Random Video:

Shakira turns 34 today and this song, which samples the opening of "Deja Vu (Uptown Baby)" by Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz and features the erstwhile President of Haiti, is one of my favorite pop songs ever.

Solidarity

2011-01-31T23:54:00.002-05:00

I hate absolutes, so I don't know if the guy that the people of Egypt are trying to install is going to be better than Mubarak and I find it hard to throw myself whole-heartedly into an uprising when people are looting and breaking out prisoners (not all of whom, I assume, were in prison for unjust political reasons). But, of course, we shouldn't let a few bad apples spoil the freedom-seeking bunch. So tonight I stand in solidarity with the people of Egypt, or, rather, I move in solidarity with them.

Worst of the Worst: #100, Whiteout

2011-01-30T23:11:00.002-05:00

In which a clerk is typing up an important document, one that will change the history of the world, and makes an error. How quickly can he correct it?

No, that's not it.

In which we take a trip inside the Republican side of Congress to see how many minorities there are.

No, not right either.

Whiteout, the seventy-first movie I've seen on this list, is a murder mystery that takes place in Antarctica. When a scientist's body turns up in far away from the station at which he worked, a U.S. Marshal must find out who killed him before the killer gets her. In order to solve the mystery, she must battle the extreme elements.

Well, they're only sort of extreme. There's lots of talk in the movie about how cold it gets and how that can kill you but the marshal, played by Kate Beckinsale, never does cover her face up when she goes outside because Beckinsale is just too darn good-looking for that. Also, there are ropes all around the science stations so that people can find their way around during whiteout conditions. This leads to a number of scenes -- by which I mean a number greater than one -- in which suspense is derived from a character trying to change their caribiner from one rope to the next while being chased by someone also attached to the rope. How exciting is that?! In one such scene, being detached from the rope means you will immediately get blown away by the wind, yet when attached to the rope the people are able to move about easily. So, yeah, the elements are extreme, but only when convenient to the story.

There's much to be made about how isolated Antarctica is, yet an FBI agent just happens to show up at one point randomly. Would have made sense if he was the bad guy, but he wasn't. Just popped in, I guess. The only other Antarctica movies I can think of are The Thing, March of the Penguins, and Alien vs. Predator. So Antarctica movies are batting about .500 right now.

This one is mostly just boring, aside from the laziness in the writing. Yet another in the long line of thrillers where they've given you no reason to care about any character and therefore there is no reason to feel any suspense about anything. If she dies, she dies. Whatever. Her life sucks because she lives on Antarctica anyway.

Ostensibly, this is the "best" of the one hundred worst movies from 2000-09. It's not nearly the worst, but it's not the best of the movies I've seen so far. It's all relative, of course, but I'd probably give that honor to Broken Bridges (the Toby Keith family drama) or, yes, Boat Trip. Whiteout is somewhere below those two, but it is certainly better than -- as I beat this dead horse over and over -- Year One, which is the one movie that is not on this list but absolutely belongs on it. Maybe it was #101.

Suggestions

2011-01-27T23:33:00.002-05:00

As the Thursday night comedies go, Community is probably the one that is least easy to jump into for a week because so much of the show is based on character development, so while tonight's was very funny, I'm not sure a casual viewer would enjoy it as much as I did. However, both Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock had ridiculous episodes tonight that are funny on their own. I probably laughed hardest at a certain sequence at the end of 30 Rock, the funniest Jon Gosselin-related joke in a very long time, but Parks and Rec was the funniest overall. Have to see it if only for Rob Lowe's performance.

Just A Smidge To Your Left

2011-01-26T00:02:00.001-05:00

You know, I tweeted a bunch of jokes during what I thought was a good, but not great by any means, State of the Union Address. In the end, nothing I could write here is funnier than just watching this. No, we're over here, Congresswoman.

Worst of the Worst: #36, The Whole Ten Yards

2011-01-24T23:11:00.003-05:00

I have not seen The Whole Nine Yards, so it's possible that I missed a lot of the point, but the reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes who gave this a 4% don't seem to think so. I refused to even look up the plot of the first one. I figured I could just catch the general gist from whatever happens in this one. I sort of got what each character's role was, but it's not like I cared.

The movie is like a Fozzy Bear routine, gag after gag after gag that fall flat. There were a couple of times that I expected one of the characters to say, "Wacka wacka," or for there to be a rim shot. I'm not sure that Matthew Perry is generally funny and Amanda Peet can be hot or cold, but Bruce Willis is an accomplished actor. Pretty sure I saw him in the background of a scene cashing his paycheck. At least that was better than Kevin Pollak, playing a slapstick Hungarian gangster with bad writing and a worse accent.

In fact, if the title weren't already taken, Back For More Cash would be a fitting moniker for this lazy exercise in sequel-making. I presume the first one was generally well-liked so, like many comedy sequels -- he says, fearing for The Hangover 2 -- they just went back to the well. How lazy is it? IMDB marks seventy-two -- seventy-two -- different errors in the film. It's less a movie to be enjoyed than a continuity-error-finding game from a seriously sadistic Highlights issue.

70 down, 30 to go.

Worst of the Worst: #39, Miss March; #88, Kaena: The Prophecy

2011-01-24T00:15:00.002-05:00

A double shot for no particular reason other than I had the time and hadn't watched one in a few weeks. Also, my reviews for each are quite short, so why not combine them?

1) There are no redeeming qualities to Miss March. None. The two guys who wrote, directed, and starred in the film are going for a Harold and Kumar-type vibe, but they are neither smart enough nor funny enough to pull it off. For a movie about guys road-tripping to the Playboy Mansion, it is telling that there are more poop jokes -- graphic ones -- than there are sex jokes. Nobody in the movie is even slightly likable. I'm not offended easily and I don't really care about the whole "R-word" movement, but I was taken aback by how often the word "retarded" is used in this one. Even Craig Robinson playing a rapper with an obscene name that is supposed to be funny, but instead is just dumb, can't save it. Nothing can save it.

2) Then, we go to Kaena: The Prophecy, the English dub of a French animated sci-fi movie. It uses the same CGI as video games, which is slightly interesting except the people are all wrong. They don't quite look or move right. At least the plot is original, dealing with a planet of people who live in a tree that is under attack and one precocious girl goes on a quest to save them. That hasn't been made into a movie too many times. The girl is fifteen, but is quite inappropriately buxom -- a major problem with women in animation -- and there is, in ostensibly a kid's movie, one creepy sexual reference. The biggest thing is that the movie just doesn't make any sense. You never know what's going on because you can't figure out who the characters are or why they do what they do and the end sequence just left me scratching my head. Maybe the French could understand it.

Ron F***ing Swanson

2011-01-20T23:30:00.000-05:00

The return of NBC's Thursday night comedies with a decent 30 Rock and a good, but not great, Community. But the big thing was the return of Parks and Recreation and the brilliance that is Ron Swanson. This is from a past season.

For The Record

2011-01-19T23:53:00.002-05:00

Nope, didn't watch one second of Idol and didn't miss it a bit. In other words, there was nothing on TV. Anyways, here is the song to which the baby fell asleep tonight. She's not a whiny kid, but she might become one if I keep letting her listen to this kind of stuff.

Pretty, Pretty Good

2011-01-18T23:29:00.003-05:00

The Monologue:

What is there to say about this article? First, people overreact. Second, the commenters who are quoted have the geekiest screen names possible. Third, people overreact. God forbid I not be able to manage my Netflix queue from my Wii!
Also, why did the writer have to make a point that this was announced on MLK Day. Netflix is f***ing with my civil rights!
I've had a problem for a while with how blog-heavy Yahoo! has become. They keep promoting stupid things with their headlines.
Say what you will, but Palin doesn't let anything get in her way or make her admit a mistake, no matter how often people try to crucify her.

Random Pop Culture:

How has Wayne Brady not yet been offered Regis' job. Am I right? Who would be better for any large number of reasons?
Plus, Regis makes Larry King look like Meir Kahane. Or something like that.
AMC gets a lot of deserved pub for having the two best shows on TV and the biggest new hit, but it is not the non-premium cable channel with the best shows. That would be FX. It has three of the best comedies in Louie, Archer, and It's Always Sunny, and it had the best new show of 2010 in Terriers and the best non-AMC drama in Sons of Anarchy. Tonight marked the second episode of FX's Lights Out, a new drama about a former boxing champ trying to keep his life and family together as his finances and health erode. Another great show. The last ten minutes of the pilot are Godfather-esque and the last bit of tonight's episode was close.

Random Video:

An amazing mix of a great cable TV show, as mentioned above -- in fact, my single favorite sitcom of all time -- and music that I use to put the baby to sleep. When I'm not hitting her with early '90s pop, the Mussorgsky piece accompanying this teaser is my classical music of choice.

You Can Spin Anything

2011-01-17T22:22:00.002-05:00

The Monologue:

I don't think I've done this blog regularly in about three weeks. Three weeks worth of jokes!
The NFL wussed out because of snow in Philadelphia and then everyone got a blood libel against them. Am I right?
Never mind, we'll just start over again tomorrow.

Random Pop Culture:

The ending of the winter finale of How I Met Your Mother only works if the next episode was appropriate. It was pretty good. A lot of the jokes missed, but Jason Segel did a really, really nice job. We'll see if the death was for just this one-off episode or if it hangs over everyone for the foreseeable future. Grey's Anatomy did a great job of that with the shooting, but we'll see.
Matthew Lillard looked about 45 on House tonight. After writing that sentence, I looked on IMDB and he's 40. 40!
Okay, I never did my best of 2010's TV. It's pretty simple. We lost Lost and Aaron Paul killed on Breaking Bad. Terriers became one of the great one-season shows in recent memory and FX dropped a couple of other tremendous shows in Archer and Louie. You want to know the best show, the best acting, and the single best episode of the year? Easy. Six words: That's. What. The. Money. Is. For.

Random Video:

On nights on which I put the baby to bed, I'll provide the song to which she fell asleep. The baby, by the way, is awesome.

Movies

2011-01-16T23:46:00.001-05:00

Crisis of motivation lately. Vacation, work trip, no great ideas. Anyways, I forgot that I had seen 'The Kids Are Alright'. I take back what I said about 'The Social Network' being the most overrated movie of the year.

Why Bother?

2011-01-12T21:13:00.001-05:00

A break from an intense work trip to touch on how people react to Sarah Palin. She used the term "blood libel" in her unconciliatiory video about the shooting in Tucson. Yes, that is inappropriate and connotatively anti-Semitic. You can get angry about it, but why scream or tweet or whatever? She doesn't care what anyone says. The people who love her aren't going to change their minds. The people who hate her will hate her no matter what. I can't imagine there are any people with no opinion any more. Screaming only makes one seem like they're screaming for their own good. Just let her be. Indifference can be more powerful than emotion sometimes.

Playoffs? Playoffs?!

2011-01-06T21:56:00.002-05:00

2010's TV still to come. First this great story and then my picks for the NFL playoffs this weekend.

Saints at Seahawks: The Saints are the defending champs and the Seahawks are the first team to make the playoffs with a losing record. The Saints destroyed Seattle in New Orleans earlier in the year thanks to the hard feelings between Reggie Bush and Pete Carroll. I'm taking Seattle and the 10-1/2 points here. New Orleans has no running game and that number is just too big for me for a home team.

Jets at Colts: The Colts defense is horrible, but the Jets offense is inconsistent. Do you trust Sanchez on the road if the Colts decide to take away the run and make him beat them? I'm rooting for the Jets because I want to see them play the Patriots next week, but I'll take Manning and give the 3 points here. At home, I think he can flat out outscore the Jets.

Ravens at Chiefs: The Chiefs beat one playoff team, Seattle. I don't really need to say much more than that. Ravens and the 3 points.

Packers at Eagles: I keep going back and forth on this. The Eagles defense is actually slightly better against QBs than Green Bay. Vick was exposed against Minnesota, but you would think that it's unlikely that they would fall for the same safety blitz that the Vikings ran, oh, every single play with success. Green Bay is one-dimensional on offense, but that one dimension is really good. Give me Green Bay plus 3 points on the strength of their defense and their momentum.

2010: Movies

2011-01-05T22:28:00.002-05:00

I don't follow new music enough to say anything. I bought four albums all year: Eminem, Kanye, Ben Folds/Nick Hornby, and the Treme soundtrack. All great -- Kanye's the best, but you've probably heard that everywhere -- but nothing new, per se.

Ditto books. I read seven books that I can remember, two of which that are new. Team of Rivals took me about six months of sporadic reading and then I relatively burned through the Stieg Larsson trilogy and the Hunger Games trilogy. Again, all good, except for maybe The Girl Who Played With Fire.

TV will take a bit longer, so I'll just go with movies tonight. I saw a total of two movies in the theaters after mid-August, but I tried to see a bunch before that. Some lists based on what I saw, which I'm sure will change as I see more of the Oscar movies.

Best Scene:

3. The Last 30 Minutes of The Expendables -- Okay, not really, but it was freaking awesome.
2. Andy Gives Up His Childhood, Toy Story 3 -- One of the great tearjerker scenes in recent memory.
1. The Turning Room, Inception -- An amazing special effect; you could tell it wasn't CGI but it still looked as stupendous as almost anything in Avatar.

Biggest Disappointment:

3. The Social Network -- I saw it after all of the huge hype and it may win Best Picture, but I just don't think it was "Best Picture good." Some all-time moments but a lot of flaws, glaring ones if you've read the book.
2. The Losers -- An awful, awful movie, but you'd think it would be a lot more entertaining with its cast (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Idris Elba, Zoe Saldana, Chris Evans, Jason Patric). Nope.
1. The End of Iron Man 2 -- Okay, so they have this huge fight with tons of unbeatable robots and then he just presses a button and shoots a super laser that kills all of the bad guys? Then, he beats the ultimate villain by crossing the streams? Iron Man 2 ripped off its ending from Ghostbusters. Shameful.

Best Acting:

3. Chloe Moretz, Kick-Ass -- She's 13. Seriously. And awesome.
2. Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network -- He really was quite good. I remember a few years ago when Adventureland came out and I thought Eisenberg was the guy you cast when Michael Cera wasn't available. But then came the perfection of Zombieland and I hit the turning point on him.
1. Jeff Bridges, True Grit -- He may not be getting award mentions because people take him for granted. He acts better in moments in this film where he is silent and moving one eye than most actors ever will with a great script.

Worst Movie:

3. Little Fockers -- I didn't see it, but you know it belongs here.
2. The Losers -- This movie is seeing for one thing and one thing alone: Jason Patric's acting. It's a clinic. I've never felt more uncomfortable watching someone butcher the art of cinema than any time that he was on the screen.
1. Robin Hood -- I almost walked out forty-five minutes into the movie, but thankfully it got merely boring after that. Those first forty-five minutes, though? Oh. My. God.

Best Movie:

5. Kick-Ass -- Slick, fun, and even Nicolas Cage was great in it.
4. True Grit -- You know I love the Coen Brothers.
3. The Social Network -- It was flawed, but the good parts were brilliant.
2. Inception -- I actually have it saved on Amazon VOD to re-watch because I feel like I was able to nitpick the hell out of it after the initial amazement.
1. Toy Story 3 -- Inception is great and I can totally understand why people have it as #1, but any movie that can stir the mix of strong, strong emotions that this one can? You don't find that too often.

Just This Once

2011-01-05T00:05:00.002-05:00

You know, liberals can really piss me off. I'm all for fair and equal treatment of everyone, people with money giving back or having to pay taxes to support society, and plenty of other ideals that people would call liberal. It's the political correctness that can kill me. I see tweets from people that are outraged that Huckleberry Finn is being censored. It's one printing from one publishing house. Not every copy of the book ever. Chill the f*** out.

Getting There

2011-01-03T22:41:00.002-05:00

Been meaning to do a "best of 2010" bit, but I've lost motivation. Between vacation, football, not watching a bad movie over the weekend, and playing NBA 2K11 a lot, I'm a little off on this right now. Maybe tomorrow, unless I watch a bad movie. I thought about doing it tonight, but got sidetracked when I was infuriated by the awful How I Met Your Mother episode. The jokes were probably average quality for the show, but the episode included numbers that kept showing up on various books or TV screens that counted down from fifty. When they got to one, the show ended on a huge non-sequitir. So they're making you not pay attention to anything going on and then they drop something that didn't fit with anything else. Okay...

Into The Territories

2010-12-28T23:50:00.002-05:00

On vacation and not much going on other than nightly Jeopardy viewings (we all laughed out loud when the first question in one of the categories tonight had to do with a Russian classical music piece). Went to see True Grit yesterday and it is as enthralling and beautiful as you would expect. Jeff Bridges is brilliant, as are the writing and cinematography. I know that not everyone who reads this blog liked No Country for Old Men and I still can't understand that, but True Grit may be more to most people's likings. There is plenty of symbolism and there are things to talk about, but it is a more straightforward story.

I'll do my best of the year over the next few days, but tomorrow it's off to Charleston. One hundred and fifty years ago on this date, the Union soldiers stationed in South Carolina had consolidated in a small fort in the middle of Charleston's harbor and they would stay there until April 12, 1861. I'm excited to visit what was the first focal point of the secession to see how the modern residents of Charleston are marking the anniversary. I've already seen some Confederate stuff on cars. Odds are I blow up Twitter tomorrow.

Worst of the Worst: #58, Christmas With The Kranks

2010-12-26T23:59:00.006-05:00

I'm now about two-thirds finished with my quest to watch the one hundred worst movies of 2000-09, according to Rotten Tomatoes, so I expect to finished long before this time next year. Therefore, I took the opportunity to watch the third and final (and worst, in my opinion) Christmas movie on the list, Christmas with the Kranks, based on John Grisham's novel, Skipping Christmas. Judging by my main problem with the movie, Grisham should maybe stick to the formulaic lawyer novels.

There is plenty not to like about the movie-making here. Tim Allen seems to sleepwalk through every movie role he has and it has only ever really worked in Galaxy Quest, where his character was supposed to be disinterested. Granted, the writing in Galaxy Quest is also quite strong, whereas this script was a disaster. Joke after joke that miss, both one-liners and slapstick. The camera work is pretty bad, as each conversation turns into a close-up fest that makes it seem that no two actors were ever in a room together. The editing is probably the worst technical thing about the movie as there are three separate plots that do not happen simultaneously, so the eighty-something-minute film feels like it is three hours long. Of course, it's also pretty boring, which doesn't help.

The worst part about the movie, though, is the message. The plot deals with a couple who, when their daughter joins the Peace Corps and will not be home for Christmas for the first time, look at how much money they usually spend and decide to skip Christmas, opting instead for a cruise. They refuse to decorate, buy anything Christmas-y, or participate in any of the neighborhood contests. I am again reminded that very few Christmas movies involve neighborhoods that have any Jews because everyone is aghast at the plans to skip Christmas. The neighbors protest and even the local priest is upset that the couple is not buying anything decorative. When the daughter decides to surprise everyone by coming home, they then rush to put together an appropriate Christmas and learn that they should be neighborly (read: conform). The third plot deals with a robber and Santa Claus. Don't ask.

Anything missing from that Christmas movie plot above? Hint: it starts with a 'J' and ends with an 's'. Yes, even the priest is unhappy that the family is not celebrating Christmas by buying stuff, there is no mention of them ever going to mass. The religious aspect of Christmas is not mentioned once in the movie. Believe me, I was listening pretty hard for it after a while. So, I was ready to scream anti-Semitism because the movie is about people being incredulous that anyone would ever want to skip Christmas, but it turns out to be anti-Christian, too. It sings the praises of materialism and conformity which, granted, are important aspects of Christmas in our society, but they probably shouldn't be. The only mention of Christ in this movie was as the first half of a compound word ending with 'mas'. I hate a preachy religious movie as much as anyone, but "mas Christ" is exactly what this hateful film could have used.