Stuff

Random babbles from the day:

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

Worst of the Worst: #59, 88 Minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Snowpocalypse

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

So Long To Find Out

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

Steven Seagal, Lawman

If you did not heed my call and watch Steven Seagal, Lawman tonight then I don't know what to say. You punished yourself. No amount of disappointment on my part would add to that. It has already become a must-watch show for me. Here's what you missed if you didn't see it:

• Seagal, now 57 and with a good amount of extra weight, has been a deputy sherriff (I gather an honorary one at first, but now for real) with a police department in New Orleans for the last twenty years. This show is like Cops, but following his patrols, interspersed with him teaching his fellow officers lessons about martial arts.
• The thing he apparently most prides himself on is his ability to see small things that tip him off as to how someone is about to act. They show this by essentially giving him super-vision (or Seagal-vision), slowing down the film and highlighting a person while playing a neat sound effect. This happens often and always with great unintentional humor.
• He likes to remind everyone that he knows martial arts. Often. There's no doubt that he is legitimately a great master, but he keeps saying it over and over. And as quick as he is, he gets out of breath quickly when he's chasing down a criminal.
• He likes to impart wisdom to everyone he comes across. Wisdom about guns, about martial arts, about Zen Buddhism, about drunk people, and so on.
• One might think the show could have also been called Steven Seagal Accosts Black People, because while the vast majority of the people in his area are black (and, therefore, the vast majority of the criminals), he and his team made a boo-boo that looked bad racially. Seagal-vision showed that a car the patrol passed most likely had a drunk driver. So they proceeded to pull all of the guys out of the car, yell at them, find a gun and take it, yell some more, and even threaten a little. Of course, the car, with all black people in it, is not in fact stolen, nobody in it is drunk, and the gun was perfectly legal. Whoops!
• Seagal not only takes himself very seriously, which adds to the comedy, but he speaks with a heavy Lousiana patois throughout. He's from Michigan.
• One of the police officers at one point says that he sometimes forgets that Seagal was a big movie star. Amen, brother. Well, if he ever really was one in the first place.
• The key crime moment of the two episodes that aired tonight was when, after breaking up a huge fight, the cops threw a big guy into the back of a police cruiser. The guy, cuffed and angry, kicked out the window. So the cops tasered the s*** out of him. Good times.
• But it's really all about a quote towards the end of the episode, one that can inform the rest of our lives. Some new recruits come in to learn self defense at the hands of the aikido master and Seagal really is quick. It's pretty cool. As they all sit there, smiling, the star of the show says this: "You can say, 'wow, that's Steven Seagal the movie star," or you can get that s*** out of your head and say, 'Steven Seagal can save my life.'" Yes.

Bonus Video:

This is freaking fantastic.

Emergency Announcement

I rarely do this, but I have an important emergency announcement. Tonight, 10PM, A&E: the premiere of Steven Seagal, Lawman. It is a reality show that follows Seagal as he moonlights as a deputy in Louisiana. I have heard from multiple sources that it obliterates the unintentional comedy scale.

Now, back to calling everyone I know to ask them to change their outgoing voice mail message to only numbers.

Tuesday

• The Monologue:
• Lisa Loeb, one-hit wonder, had her first child. She's going to try really hard to have a second, but nobody will be interested.
• Sheila Dixon, soon to be former mayor of Baltimore, was found guilty of embezzlement for taking gift cards given to the city. It's a total frame job, though. It was all about Commissioner Burrell cooking the stats.
• Who cares about this story? Really, like Cheney would have any shot. It's all about the title, "Cheney beats back 2012 efforts." If one did not know better, one might think it was about his plan to end the world.
• Random Pop Culture:
• When I was at a major Jewish conference downtown -- the one where I saw Netanyahu -- a few weeks ago, Fred Phelps' people were down there protesting. Now, his daughter is on Twitter and I'm enthralled. Those folks are so crazy with the "God Hates Fags" and "God Hates Jews" stuff that they've achieved irony status. They've succeeded in being funnier than any shock comedian could hope to be. Yes, it's scary that they actually believe it, but there are so few of them that I don't feel so bad.
• Now that I'm done with Under The Dome, Stephen King's latest book (it's very good and unabashedly a not-at-all-veiled metaphor about how horrible Bush was), I'm looking for something to read. Any suggestions?
• Coming Soon:
• With the end of the year quickly approaching, I'll be working on my usual best-of lists. However, we have an added bonus with this being the end of a decade, so I'll throw some of that together as well. Let me know if you have any ideas or want to participate.