- The ‘future looks like modern day London. Except if you’re watching old shows, then it looks like 60’s London.
- The Dr’s time traveling device is a telephone booth. From my understanding, everyone can see it and see him pop in from whenever he’s coming from.
- What’s to keep someone from getting into his phone booth and jacking his time-ride?
- When phasing into existence, what happens to the people who are occupying the street where the phone booth lands. London is a walking town and the streets are always full of people.
- Why is the super smart time-space phone booth called a tardus???
The Muppets Movie Review
For once, my sense of nostalgia managed to beat down my sense of cynicism.
Odds are I should have seen Hugo, as that would have helped maintain my nerd credibility, but the fact is I used to watch the Muppets as a kid and loved it. If there is a puppet character on the planet greater than Gonzo the Great then I will eat one my my t-shirts. I loved almost all of them. Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Beeker, Scooter, the Swedish Chef, Animal, Link Hogthrob, Lew Zealand (and his boomerang fish), Sam the Eagle, Statler and Waldorf; just listing them here puts a smile on my face. Ironically it was the main characters who annoyed me. Miss Piggy drove me berzerk, Fozzie the Bear I wanted to stuff into a microwave, and even Kermit the Frog bugged me. I liked him, but he was such a wimp sometimes it drove me nuts. Also, the romance between a hideous hog in a blond wig and makeup and a bug eyed frog kind of made me cringe.
However, the secondary characters always carried me through, and before you really get into this review understand that I will be writing it while viewing through rose colored nostalgia glasses. To be honest, I laughed my ass off throughout the film. For those of you who are regular readers and see this as completely divergent from my normal style rest assured that the next horrible script that comes across the screen I will jump on twice as hard for all the good things I say about this one.
Anyway, this movie starts off badly, actually, with the introduction of a new Muppet character named Walter, who is growing up in Smalltown USA with the two script anchors, his brother Gary (Jason Segel – How I Met Your Mother, 
Forgetting Sarah Marshal, Despicable Me. How I Met Your Mother image courtesy of the TV Show T Shirt category) and Gary’s girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams- Enchanted, the Fighter, Catch Me if You Can). Walter is a super Muppet fan, while Gary is is big brother who keeps more or less neglecting his girlfriend in order to help take care of his brother. They are taking a bus trip to LA to visit Muppet studios. At this point my early warning suckage alarm was blaring in my ear. However, while on the tour of the abandoned, decrepit, crumbling Muppet Studio Walter sneaks into Kermit’s old office and overhears a meeting between the great duo of Statler and Waldorf, in the process of selling the studio off to Tex Richman (Chris Cooper-American Beauty, the Bourne Identity, the Patriot) who plans to demolish the place and drill for oil. After finally giving the plot a kick start Walter tracks down Kermit and convinces him to reunite the whole gang to do a telethon to save the studio. At that point we go into a series of funny “where are they now” scenes the eventually morphs into a montage. I don’t want to give a lot away, but the one that made me laugh the hardest was seeing Scooter working at Google. Hilarious.
They managed to convince a TV executive (Super hot Rashida Jones-Parks and Recreation, the Social Network, I Love You, Man. She was looking a lot better than she did as a lesbian in Our Idiot Brother) to give them two hours to run their show. Muppet hijinks ensue. Jack Black (School of Rock, Tropic Thunder) gets kidnapped to be the celebrity host and managed to not annoy me. A ton of celebrity cameos surface to operate the telethon phones. Zach Galifianakis plays a local homeless man (not much of an acting stretch, although I like him a lot). The cameo list is really impressive, and it’s not just a bunch of washed up losers. Really cool.
The story progresses. The show has some great Muppet skits. I laughed a lot. The characters frequently break the fourth walls in really clever and funny ways. I left the theater smiling.
The stars. The Muppets. Two stars. Story, characters, and dialog mostly true to the original show. Three stars. A PG film that felt appropriate at PG. One star. A couple of scenes in particular, especially the Gonzo the Great recruitment scene and the Scooter thing, had me really laughing. One star. A few of the skits for the final show were worthy of the original show, just done with higher production values. One star. The celebrity cameos actually added a lot rather than slowing things down. One star. All puppets. No attempt to render in CGI or make them cartoons, live action cartoons, or anything in between (that would have ruined this film on about 14 levels. Suck it, Alvin and the Chipmunks). One star. Overall, super fun. Two stars. Total: twelve stars.
Now the black holes. I will admit that there were issues with this film that I would have pushed a lesser film off a subway platform for, but my enjoyment of the movie has helped me do a mental wash over most of them. I will focus on the really glaring ones. The biggest flaw this movie suffers from is the same one that plagues all of the Transformers movies: too much of humans, not enough of Muppets (or, in the case of Transformers, robots). If you recall the show the humans were always at most ancillary characters who mostly there just to highlight how cool the Muppets were (IMO), and there was never more than one. Here, there are entire scenes and horrible song and dance numbers featuring only humans. Two black holes. Introducing a new Muppet as the protagonist who is really kind of bland and boring, with nothing notably about him at all. This is what happens when you don’t have Jim Henson involved. One black hole. That’s it. Three black holes.
So a grand total of nine black holes, and my hearty endorsement. Go see this film. Take your kids. They will love it. If you grew up in the 80’s this will rock for you, and the humor is sophisticated enough to keep an adult entertained. Good date movie? Absolutely. If your date isn’t laughing, feeling good, and having her inhibitions lowered by this film leave her at the theater as odds are she is really a serial killer looking to gut and make a new skin suit out of you as soon as you get alone.
Thanks for reading. I will probably see Hugo tonight at the Grand Lake Cinema and write it up tomorrow. I also saw the Descendants and have some funny thoughts about that film, but I there is so much good stuff out right now I think I will save it for Sunday. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. Thanks again. Talk to you all later.
Dave
Moneyball movie review
Pretty much on the money.
It is a conundrum of my life that I find baseball painfully boring to watch or participate in, but for some reason love baseball movies. Eight Men Out, Major League, the Bad News Bears; they all have a freakish fascination for me. I especially love movies where the team in question is a come from behind underdog. There is just something weirdly fascinating about it for me.
So, Moneyball. I liked it. Fun, interesting, and basically shot around Oakland, the town I have lived in for the last ten years. There is a special thrill when you see a scene shot in the parking lot where one of your friends puked his guts out after getting blackout drunk. You somehow feel closer to the movies.
It is the story of the Oakland A’s, known as the poorest team in professional baseball. One of my favorite actors, Brad Pitt, plays Billy Beane, the Oakland general manager as he struggles to put together a winning team on a budget. The problem is all his best players recently got hired away by other, richer teams and he is left with the dregs. While trying to negotiate a player trade he meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, the fat kid from Superbad. He was also in Knocked Up and had a voice over roll in one of my personal favorites, Megamind), a recent Yale graduate with a degree in economics. Turns out young Peter has been looking at baseball players from a statistical analysis point of view, and Billy hires him to help put together a budget team that can win. Peter goes through the dregs of players, looking for ones that can get on base and actually score. They put together a team that, while lacking any major stars that dazzle, manages to deliver a solid performance and set a record breaking winning streak. I won’t spoil the story by telling you how it ends, although if you are familiar with the Oakland A’s you probably already know. (Baseball jersey t shirt image from Eastbound and Down courtesy of the TV show t shirt category)
There are some subplots tied into the team manager having issues with how Billy is putting together his team, Billy’s twelve year old daughter, and a bunch of flashbacks to his own youthful baseball career that honestly seemed a little forced in and pointless. We got some good character development from Billy and his daughter. The flashbacks didn’t seem to add a lot.
The stars. Baseball movie. One star. Brad Pitt. One star. Great performances all around. One star. They didn’t feel compelled to lower the story to the lowest common denominator and crowbar in a stupid hot girl to be some kind of love interest or team intern or whatever. One star. There was a definitive story arc for Billy and you can really see his character develop. One star. The analysis they did made a lot of sense, and nothing seemed weird or out of place. One star. They gave us a nice look into the inner workings of major league baseball and how the whole team development works. One star. Billy’s daughter didn’t annoy. One star. Set in Oakland and about our local team. One star. As far as I know they kept to the actual story. One star. The managed to avoid a dumb Hollywood ending. One more star for an overall good movie experience. Total: twelve stars.
The black holes. Pacing seemed sluggish at times. There were times when I found myself bored as we watched yet another video of some forgotten baseball player with a hidden talent and Peter telling Billy why he was worth looking at. The editing could have been tightened up some. One black hole. There were a couple sub plots that didn’t need to be in the movie, including the whole Billy flashback sequence. Also there was one scene where we meet Billy’s ex wife and her hippy dippy husband that went no where. One black hole. Brad Pitt and about 80% of the cast spent the whole movie dipping, a habit I find uber disgusting. Seriously, it turns my stomach, like a giant pus and maggot hoagie. I know it’s a baseball thing, but it really threw me off the whole time. One black hole. Weirdly enough, in spite of my actual dislike of watching baseball, I feel this movie would have benefited from some more actual baseball footage. A lot of time spent indoors. One black hole. Total: four black holes.
So a grand total of eight stars, a great score for a great movie. Try to see it in a theater, if you can, although there would be nothing wrong with seeing it on your TV. It will work in both venues. Decent date movie too, as there is a lot of humor and heartwarming scenes, particularity with Billy and his daughter.
Killer Elite review tomorrow. I saw it tonight and will write it up in the morning. Thanks for reading. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Drive Movie Review
Overall pretty good, although not without it’s issues, which I will get into in a minute. Incidentally, I seem to have picked up a movie viewing partner, at least for the non violent or horror films. She liked it as well, but was bitter about the lack of Ryan Gosling without his shirt off. No, we are not a couple, nor are we likely to be.
The movie starts off great, with the completely unnamed protagonist (which bugs me, by the way. Even the tire in Rubber got a name. It just smacks of pretension) Ryan Gosling delivering very specific and chilling instructions to a client who is hiring him to drive a getaway vehicle for a robbery. While I question the need any petty B&E criminal might have to hire a professional driver they don’t know when there are millions of people who can drive in LA, it does lead us into a really cool cop chase/stealth sequence through the streets of downtown LA (actually most of the film seemed to be shot within six blocks of this cruddy studio apartment I had when I lived in the sphincter of Los Angeles). After that, the film pacing slips from third gear (expect a lot of car and driving jokes in this review) into park as we go through 25 minutes of sluggish character and plot development. I say character development as there is no other term for it, but due to the fact that except for his job description speech (which he delivers twice) Ryan Gosling does not say more than five words at a time for the entire rest of the movie. He gives a new face to the term taciturn.
It seems cool at first, but eventually you just want to shake him until he gives us something. We go the entire movie learning nothing about him, his past, or his motivations. We find out that he works as a Hollywood stunt driver and auto mechanic. He is an excellent driver. The end. His actions seem inconsistent as well. One minute he is risking his life to help his neighbor and love interest get her ex con husband out of debt to some bad people, and the next he is punching another girl in the face. You gain nothing about him as a human, and during the course of the film seems as inanimate as one of the cars he drives.
Anyway, the driver has a friend who is trying to set him up in the stock car business, and is borrowing money from gangsters. Meanwhile, he is falling in love (maybe. His actions and facial expressions could mean anything) with his neighbor, the super cute and innocent looking Carey Mulligan (not a lot of stuff I’m familiar with. Pride and Predjudice, I guess. She had a role for a while on Dr. Who. David Tennant image courtesy of the TV show t shirts), who has a kid who bonds with him as well. Unfortunately the baby daddy (played 
really well by Oscar Isaac. You might remember him as Blue from Sucker Punch) is in prison for some ill defined crime and once he gets out has to rob a pawn shop for guys he owes money from. At that point the movie gets a little confusing. The crime goes perfectly to a point but there is some other car there to stop their getaway. The husband gets killed but the driver and some girl accomplice get away from the other car. They try to figure out what is going on and the driver punches the girl in the face in order to get her to tell him what she knows. Somehow one of the gangsters (Ron Perlman, one of my favorites. I’m glad to see he finally found a script that didn’t totally suck) they got involved with for the stock car deal wanted them to rob the pawn shop of some money from a different East Coast gangster. It is implied he sent the second car to screw with them but there is never any attempt to really explain what it was doing there, except for adding an exciting chase and crash sequence. Now they all want each other dead. Gangster like hijinks ensues. The driver (again without any explanation of where he comes from) proves to be an expert with a wide array of weapons and violence. The movie ends on kind of a cool, interesting note.
The stars. Good cast from top to bottom. I like every actor in here and bought them all at face value. Two stars. Attempt at a more complicated non-linear plot. One star. While there was less driving in the movie than the title would imply, what driving there was was well executed and cool. One star. While Ryan Gosling could have had a mannequin stand in for most of his scenes, the acting from everyone else was really good. One star. The ending was very cool and not what you would expect. One star. Cool noir feel. One star. A number of pretty cool cars throughout the film. One star. Some completely pointless gratuitous nudity (every gangster should be headquartered in a strip club in my opinion). One star. They didn’t hold back on the violence or try to spare anyone in the interest of softening the film. This movie earned its R rating. One star. Total: ten stars.
The black holes. A couple really glaring plot holes, especially the whole “why the hell was that second car at the robbery?” one that kept me up last night. If the guys in it worked for the East Coast mobsters then why didn’t they stop the robbery? If they worked for Ron Perlman than their presence literally made zero sense, as he was due to collect the loot anyway and could have killed the robbers at his convenience. It’s like a splinter in my brain. Two black holes. The pacing was really weird. Started off moderately fast, slowed down to a crawl, picked up for a while, slowed down again, picked up, and then kind of petered out at the end. One black hole. The whole “I’m never going to say a word about my past, opinions, feelings, or anything” really started to grind on me once in a while. It would be OK for the driver character to say something human once during the movie, like “Ouch” as his buddy is picking shotgun pellets out of his arm with no anesthetic. The Terminator had more emotion. One black hole. They did the whole “I’m going to ram your car twice with mine at night, once hard enough to T-bone your parked car off a cliff, and show no damage to my front grill. Both headlights will remain perfectly functional” thing. One black hole. Ryan Gosling’s character kind of lost a lot of sympathy from me when he punched that girl in the face and then choked her until she told him what she knew (sorry, but violence against women, like cruelty to animals, really puts me off my feed). It would have worked if he were supposed to be the bad guy. One black hole. Total: six black holes.
In the irksome but not black hole worthy category I have a few. For a movie that did the first hour with no violence whatsoever, when they finally got it going it was as violent and horrible as anything I have ever seen. The disparity kind of derailed the whole movie for me. It just shifted the tone a lot. I won’t black hole it, as I think the issue was just a lack of opportunity to show that level of violence in the first half, but there it is. Also, the loving romance between Carey Mulligan and ex con Oscar Isaac felt really fake and force. I don’t know a woman in the world who would have hung out for him. If you see the movie you will understand what I mean. Finally, for a movie called “Drive” there didn’t seem to be a lot of driving going on, and a lot of what there was seemed to be leisurely cruising around LA. Say what you will about movies like the Fast and the Furious, but when they claim to be driving films they include a ton of driving.
So a total of four stars. Not bad, not great. If you are a fan of Ryan Gosling you might be disappointing, as he spent most of the movie wearing a puffy 80’s style jacket and not really saying anything (most of the style and sound track was very 80’s). If you like driving you might be disappointing, as the driving sequences don’t really drive the film. If you like clever gangster movies you might be disappointed as the story seems to not really connect a lot. However, if you find pleasure in all three you could very well enjoy yourself. I’d say its worth watching. Nothing really draws you in to a big screen, so NetFlix it. I don’t recommend this for a date, as one second you are watching a passionate kiss and the next you are literally watching some guy get his head stomped flat.
Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. I’m trying to say more on there. I plan to see Straw Dogs tonight so look for that review tomorrow. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Movie review: Tree of Life
Film of Boredom
Look, given what I have read by other, more accomplished film critics about this movie my review is going to make me look like a knuckle dragging, low brow inbred white trash moron who can only be entertained by big explosions and bare breasts on the screen. That may well be the case, but the fact is I studied art in college, and took a lot of film and video classes. I know a few things about film theory. I love French surrealist films. Film symbolism and subtle nuance is rarely lost on me. A good independent film is a joy for me, and when I go into one that I know doesn’t conform to the Hollywood model I really try to reset my perception to look for intentions and symbolism I might not see in a movie about a super hero.
As you might have gathered from this so far, Tree of Life was not what I expected, and that’s because what I expected at some point during the movie was SOMETHING. Nothing happens during the entirety of the film. This film as like if you spliced some of the more acid induced elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey with someone’s home movies. There is no plot. There is no protagonist. There is no point. You spend two and half hours (that felt like six hours) alternating between asking “What the frak?” and praying for something, anything to happen. Hell, by the end of it I would have been happy to have had someone pull the fire alarm in the theater. (What the frak image courtesy of the tv show t shirt category).
You know, I realized about 2/3rds of the way through this opus that, if, while in school I had come across 1,000 hours of someone’s home videos and a $2,000,000 CGI effects budget this is probably the the video art project I would have come up with, for which I would have deservedly gotten a B-. For me it screams self indulgent vanity piece, which is weird because most directors do a vanity piece after they do several dozen decent movies, not four, most of which no one has ever seen (the Thin Red Line being the only one of his films I had seen previously and honestly kind of liked it).
I was so perplexed by this that I actually listened to a couple interviews with the actors in the film and found out that the director, Terry Malick, didn’t really have a script or dialog so much as he would give the actors lines as they filmed it, and allowed them to improvise as they saw fit. This actually makes a lot of sense. There is very little actual dialog in the film and what there is seems really unpolished. Instead we get to see a ton of slow panning shots of Brad Pitt’s face shot from under his chin, a lot of Stand By Me style scenes of young boys running around playing and breaking stuff, a lot of mommy bonding with babies and boys while dad is more or less abusing, and a lot of Evil Captain Kirk shot up from the ground two feet in front of him stumbling around as Sean Penn has a mental breakdown. I have said several times that this movie is like watching home movies, and that appears to be exactly how it was shot.
I won’t say it didn’t elicit emotion, as long as depression, boredom, and confusion are emotions. The movie starts off with the parents dealing with the death of a son, and then starts flashing back all over the place. The thing is, home movies can be fun and whimsical, kind of like watching the Wonder Years, but the fact that we start off knowing that one of the three boys is destined to die casts a terrible pall over every scene that follows, and you spend the entire movie wondering which of them it is going to be. Can there be anything more depressing than watching a loving mother bonding with her infant and toddler sons, knowing that in a few years one of them will be tragically killed in some ill defined manner? Of course by the end of the film I was praying for any of the characters to die, if only to break up the monotony.
Sigh. The story, for lack of a better term. The film starts off with Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain playing Mr. and Mrs. O’Brian, a typical 1950’s couple who receive the horrible news that one of their three boys has been killed. Since the news is delivered via telegram I can only assume it was in Korea or Vietnam. We get to sit through some disjointed funeral and dealing with death scenes, which for Mr. O’Brian seems to involve watering his lawn. There are some early references to Job and some highly pretentious voice over passages that all seem to be very Bible related, so I think there was something about the whole “why do bad things happen to good people?” debate in this. Anyway, we are treated to a red lava lamp (that recurs several times) that I think is supposed to represent the creator and suddenly are whipped back to the beginning of time and the creation of the universe. At this point I really wasn’t sure what was going on and had heard someone describe this film as science fiction, so my interest perked in the hope we were actually on a another planet and the dead son was going to be reincarnated as an alien, but sadly this was not to be the case. Instead we were treated to a long zero purpose montage of the creation of our planet from a flaming ball of lava to single celled organism, evolving into fish and eventually into the dinosaurs on the planet. I am not kidding. Basically we got to watch discovery channel for 20 minutes.
I said the dinosaur sequence was a montage, but honestly the entire film is a montage. It is a long (long, long) string of disconnected scenes mashed together with no attempt to have any scenes connect in any way, or for the matter have even a few of the scenes have any plot points or story significance. I doubt there is much dead footage on the cutting room floor, as Terry pretty much shoved in any scene where they didn’t accidentally shoot the boom mike. Anyway, flash forward a few hundred million years and it’s the 50’s in Waco, Texas. The O’Brians are starting their family and have three sons, who rapidly grow up to late pre-teens and pretty much stay there for the rest of the film. You occasionally flash forward even more to modern New York where Sean Penn plays some kind of architect or business owner. He is one of the sons grown up and apparently haunted by the death of his brother, so every time you start to feel even a little warm and fuzzy watching idyllic 1950’s you get a nice reminder of the impending death of one of the three precocious kids. Also, at one point he starts having acid trips and is somehow in his suit out in the desert. The scenes jump around purposelessly. Sometimes it is Brad Pitt as Wally Cleaver, being a great dad. Sometimes it is him being my dad, authoritarian and borderline abusive. Sometimes it is the boys playing, then fighting, then wrecking stuff, then getting into trouble. The thing is every time you think one of these scenes is going to develop into something, it doesn’t. There is a scene where Jack, the oldest boy, seems to have a crush on a girl from school and follows her after school. OMG is something interesting going to happen? No, lets cut to another scene of the boys chasing a frog around and never see the girl again. Jack hates his father in a classic Oedipal complex (I’d like to give the movie some credit for delivering that concept in a subtle manner, but at one point the kid pretty much shouts out that he hates his dad and that his mother only loves him). You see a scene where Mr. O’Brian is working under a car with just a flimsy jack holding it up. The kid is tempted to release the jack, possibly killing his own father. Wow, could this actually get interesting? No, lets show the kid running off and hitting a tree with a stick.
This goes on and on and on. There is a lot of weird crap thrown in too, like a repeating scene of young Jack being inside the house that is flooded and swimming out, and a recurring scene of underwater grass waving. Not sure what that was about. Eventually Sean Penn is in a scene of a bunch of people on a beach, including his dead brother and (possibly dead) mother. I guess it is supposed to be the reuniting of the dead in heaven? I spent the last hour or so praying for the credits to start rolling and then, with no apparently real conclusion or purpose, they do.
The stars. Brad Pitt. One star. Sean Penn. One star. Authentic 1950’s stuff. One star. Reasonably accurate portrayal of what young boys do when left to their own devices. One star. Some very cool old cars. One star. I’d like to give the acting a star, but really I can’t say that is so as none of the dialog scenes actually extend past two or three lines. The director could have easily just taken the top 1% of the scenes they filmed and dumped the rest to make more room for dinosaurs. I will refrain. The film and camera work were actually pretty good. One star. Total: six stars.
Now the black holes. I have to give a couple for the time I spent in the film asking “What the hell is going on?” Two black holes. Bored. Bored bored bored bored bored. Three black holes. No real plot. Two black holes. They kept flashing back to the acid trip lava lamp creator of the universe. One black hole. No real dialog. One black hole. No protagonist. One black hole. Disjointed editing. On black hole. Pacing from hell. One black hole. The actual points I think was trying to be made about either the creation of life, man’s insignificance in the universe, or the injustice of bad things happening to good people were all actually pretty prosaic, not to mention poorly delivered. One black hole. Purposeless journey to the Land of the Lost. One black hole. Total: fourteen black holes.
A less than grand total of eight black holes from me. Why, then, the disparity between this review and so many others? You see, I think this is a prime case of the Emporor’s New Clothes syndrome. This film won the prestigious Cannes’ Palme d’Or award. Cannes’ Film Festival is held in such high regard that no one who has a serious career in movie reviewing can risk going against the consensus of the film intellectual elite. Thus, every critic must say something good about it. Fortunately for you readers I have no serious film reviewing career and can say what I really feel, which is that this film was a steaming pile of pretentious crap. I don’t know. Maybe I am a moron and am missing something beuatiful and deep, but I can only review films based on my actual film viewing experience, and that experience was that at some point during the film I was wondering if the green Exit signs in the theater had actual batteries in them that needed replacing or if they used rechargeable ones they just kept charged up from the power grid. I guess on some level I sort of get what Mr. Malick was going for, and will say he managed to nail the atmosphere brilliantly, but overall I feel like I just watch two hours of random videos off YouTube.
Movie Review: Crazy, Stupid Love
Awkward, Stupid Movie
Awkward is the best word to describe pretty much every scene in this film. I’m not talking about the awkwardness that makes a situation really funny, because in spite of having Steve Carrell, one of the comedy greats of our time (if you don’t believe me watch any episode of the Office season 1-7. Dunder Mifflin image courtesy of the TV show t shirts category) in the film somehow there is nothing funny about it. This is the kind of awkwardness that makes you squirm in your seat, sphincter clenched, wishing you were getting a root canal, bikini wax, or anything at all rather than be present in the room watching this happen. You know, the dinner party where one of your two friends accuses the other of cheating, or high school where you are experiencing teenage boy issues when the teacher asks you to step up to the chalkboard. This is awkward like finding out halfway through a major presentation that you have had a paper toilet seat cover hanging out of the back of your pants. Awkward on the level of if it were happening to you you would be praying for a meteor strike or bomb to go off just to distract everyone from what was happening.
I can’t stress this point enough, by the way. The awkwardness oozes out of every orifice and pore on the body of this film, leaving a awkward slime trail across every eyeball and permeating the atmosphere like a massive blast of flatulence inside a steam sauna. I can’t say this movie was truly bad, as the acting was actually pretty good and I liked most of the cast. I just ended up every five minutes or so wishing that the Smurfs hadn’t been sold out and I were in that theater praying for a painless death (Smurfs review on Weds).
The other general thing I am going to say about this film is if you are going to watch it, wear eye protection as there are a huge number of loose ends flying together and then exploding apart all over the place and you could end up with a plot point embedded in your eyeball. The staggering number of coincidences reached the point of stupidity about halfway through the film and keeps on digging, possibly in hopes of finding coincidence nirvana. It actually reaches the point where the coincidences cease to be surprising or even interesting and just get annoying. There is one, huge surprise that is supposed to be the big shocker but by the time you get there you have built up so much scar tissue on your psyche that it barely registers. It’s like how a good horror film knows to build suspense so that when you first catch a glimpse of the monster you are shocked out of your seat and a bad horror movie has a monster pop out of every trash can and rose bush, more or less inoculating you to the horror.
Anyway, the movie. Steve Carrol plays Cal, apparently candidate for dad of the decade but failing as husband. His wife of 25 years (Julianne Moore) wants a divorce, prompting the only funny part of the entire film when Cal jumps out of a moving car. They get home to their kids, a 13 year old boy and a little girl. The boy has a crush on the baby sitter, played by by the new love of my life, Analeigh Tipton, who happens to have a crush on Cal. Cal moves out and starts hanging out at the most amazing bar on the planet where super, duper, ultra hot sophisticated women apparently hang out waiting to get picked up and taken home for sex by men. If such a place actually exists please let me know where and I will be forever your friend. Anyway, he is such a putz that he can’t get anywhere and gets befriended by Jacob (Ryan Gosling), who is the local tomcat and apparently makes his living by picking up bimbos. Jacob decides to help Cal for no apparent reason and teaches him how to dress, act, and talk all in the noble pursuit of casual sex and objectifying women. At some point super hot Emma Stone shows up as Jacobs real love interest, but that is so freakishly complicated I don’t even want to get into it. In fact, the entire story and many, many subplots are twisted like 18 strings of Christmas tree lights bundled up together and I don’t even want to strain my brain further by exploring it, except to say that non-funny romance hijinks ensue, awkward scenes are fired at the audience like bullets from a machine gun, and just when you think the scenes couldn’t get any more awkward or creepier, they do.
The stars. Overall I thought every actor did an admirable job with the material given to them. Everyone delivered a very good performance, even the 13 year old kid. One star. Steve Carell. One star. Analeigh Tipton looking so much like I want my future wife to look it physically hurt me. One star. Emma Stone was pretty hot too. One star. Kevin Bacon. One star. I can honestly say that, with a few exceptions, it was not at all predictable. One star. There was a serious attempt to add complexity to the story and make us think, so I will give them credit even if the attempt led to a horrible convoluted mess. One star. Total: seven stars.
Now the black holes. I could give about 100 for each time I tried to find the ejector seat in order to not sit through another awkward moment, but will keep myself down to five. I will say that the awkwardness included but was not limited to: the hot baby sitter walking in on the 13 year old masturbating; him telling her he thinks about her while doing it; implied underage pornography; Cal discovering that one of the many women he sleazily picked up and used was someone important to his family; Jacob taking every opportunity to display his genitalia in Cals face; the 13 year old coming face to face with the man who slept with his mother, breaking up their marriage; and the 13 year old proclaiming his love for the babysitter in school in front of everyone. Five black holes. There were multiple points in the film that seemed to really drag, and somehow managed to always coincide with some of the most awkward moments. One black hole. I have to award multiple black holes for the writers taking the idea of moderation in plot coincidences out back, shooting it, and then desecrating its corpse. Three black holes. The story got so complex and convoluted Tolkien couldn’t have unraveled it. One black hole. I find the whole concept of women being so shallow and dumb that they can be picked up and used as easily at these guys do it in the film kind of annoying and offensive. It may or may not be true, but I am going to award a black hole regardless out of both solidarity to the women I respect and frustration that I can’t do these things. One black hole. And finally, one more for calling this film a romantic comedy when I can’t recall a single funny moment. One black hole. Total: twelve black holes.
I have looked at other reviews on this and most of the reviewers seem to side on the idea that this movie is sweet and good, but I have to go with my own feelings and my feeling was that, during the course of this movie, I really wished I was watching something else. Maybe I’m too much a guy to appreciate this film, or maybe just too cynical, as the theater was full of people that seemed to enjoy it, but nevertheless I stand on my final score of 5 black holes, a miserable score and the sign of a true injustice to the quality of the actors involved in this flick. This might make a good date film, as it will definitely lead to a deep conversation, but said conversation could easily drift into topics best avoided early on in the dating cycle. If you need a date film take her to see Friends with Benefits.
Movie Review: Bad Teacher
Bad Teacher was not a bad movie. Not brilliant, or even consistently funny, but it had it’s moments and was at the least entertaining.
Before I get into this I should mention that, due to some seriously crossed wires in my head, nothing fills my mind with senseless violence like dance clubs. If you see me hanging out while other people are dancing to beat heavy bass music you can rest assured that my mind is playing a medley of violence and mayhem that would make John Woo turn pale. I have never acted on this sort of thing, and the last fight I was in was back in 7th grade (ironically, the same grade that this movie was about.
Why am I mentioning this? Because the second thing that fills my mind with repressed childhood violence is anything involving school. I just keep flashing back to all the abuse I suffered as a kid and teenager and start to see blood. So you can image what happens when I see a movie that involves some kind of school dance, as this one does. In high school I went to exactly two dances and regretted both of them.
The funny thing is, if I go to a dance club and actually start dancing I have a great time and forget about all that stuff. But if I am doing my usual wallflower routine, in my head is total chaos.
The movie. Cameron Diaz plays Elizabeth Halsey, a vain, shallow, self centered, foul mouthed middle school teacher who is also an alcoholic and pot user. There is no attempt to explain how she became a teacher or even graduated college, but there it is. She start off engaged to a rich guy who dumps her for determining (correctly) that she is a gold digger. In a move guaranteed to advance women’s advocacy and liberation, she decides she needs to find another rich guy and the way to do that is to get a boob job (did I say advance? I meant to say retard). Fortunately she works at a school that doesn’t seem to have any kind of teaching standards or ability to perceive a bad apple. She gets hit on by the gym teacher (Jason Segel, from How I Met Your Mother) and dumps him flat out in a scene that could only be crueler if she actually castrated him while doing it. Cruel and selfish are the watchwords for her, and while it occasionally generates some funny moments or lines, after about an hour it starts to wear thin. I mean, at some point you have to give us SOME reason to like her besides the fact that she is hot and witty. During the course of the movie she smokes pot on school property, steals test answers, blackmails a guy, ruins the career of the only truly dedicated and giving teacher in the film (Lucy Punch, who is actually super hot if you like red heads), purposely destroys a relationship, denigrates and humiliates her students, steals, lies, manipulates, and drinks. If she were a male you would assume she were the antagonist, not the protagonist. She has a couple moments towards the end where she turns it around, and sort of follows an arc, but the arc actually feels like a straight line that suddenly makes an illegal u-turn in front of four lanes of oncoming traffic.
Anyway, she is added by straight woman Phyllis Smith (from the Office, one of my favorite shows. Dunder Miflin shirt courtesy of the TV show t shirts) in her quest to score the hot (if you like weedy) new sub Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake), who in spite of being a low paid teacher comes from some kind of super rich family, a fact that Halsey spots like a vulture spotting a dying rabbit from 1,000 feet up. He starts out like a cool and sincere guy, but as the movie progresses turns out to be weirder and weirder. Middle school teaching hijinks ensues. Kids get hit in the face with balls. Some Guy Ritchie-esque plot twists occur. Horrible people fail to get their comeuppance, while (relatively) innocent people suffer bad consequences.
The stars. One star for the adult acting, although really I think it is just good casting. Is it really that much of a stretch for Cameron Diaz to play a vapid, shallow, gold digging bitch (not that I know anything about her personally. It just seems like a movie role she is really comfortable with)? Or for Jason Segel a sarcastic gym teacher and Phyllis Smith a timid nobody? Honestly, the best actor in this was Justin Timberlake, as much as it galls me to say it. One star. I am going to give a separate star for the kid actors. What has been happening lately where kids all learned how to act? It started with Super 8 and seems to be continuing. One star. The movie did make me laugh multiple times. On star. Pacing was really good, given that the movie stretched over the course of an entire school year. One star. All of the supporting characters were good and added something to the movie. None of them felt like wasted film. One star. Cameron Diaz and Lucy Punch were both pretty hot, although Diaz got the better outfits. One star. There was possibly the most gratuitous nude scene of all time that bordered into implied lesbianism. One star. Dialog was witty and very funny. One star. In spite of the horrible nature of Diaz’s character I did find myself identifying with her and ultimately rooting for her. One star. Total: nine stars.
Now the black holes. The horrific nature of Diaz’s character really ground on me after a while, and kind of made me afraid to ever date a woman again. One black hole. No attempt to even give a reason why she became a teacher or why any school with any kind of standards would hire her. One black hole. The plot is predictable with a capital P. One black hole. Some moments you were laughing, other moments you were cringing into your seat hoping the last joke or scene would be washed from your memory. One black hole. The ‘change of heart’ Halsey goes through in the last ten minutes felt less like a story arc and more like her body snatchers pod finally ripened and her replacement clone had arrived. One black hole. Some minor plot issues on the order of “Why would they put up with that crap?”. One black hole. Total: six black holes.
That whole “School dances make me go berserk” thing I could have given a black hole to, but I think that is my own personal issue, not shared by a lot of you. I also found irksome the fact that a super rich, super hot (apparently) guy would even want to be a teacher.
Anyway, three stars total. Worth seeing on NetFlix, I guess. Not a good date movie, in spite of it being more or less a chick flick, as your date will assume (probably correctly) that you have a thing for Cameron Diaz and that is the only reason you are going. Of course, you could retort with the idea that she is only there for Justin Timberlake, but trust me when I say there is no winning that argument.
Nerd Dating: the greatest date ever-movie night in Part 4 what to watch
OK, you have cleaned out your apartment (bulldozers are not not an option, BTW) and have her coming over. However, it now falls upon you to help figure out what the hell to watch. DO NOT make the mistake of just letting her pick. First of all, she will feel like you are a total wimp for not even having an opinion. Also, most women will feel a lot of pressure from unilaterally picking out a movie, for fear you will judge her negatively and/or be really bored with the movie. The women who don’t feel pressure are either so over opinionated that they know what you should be watching (“I just know you are going to love Love and Other Drugs!”) or just a total sociopath who will have no problem subjecting you to Thelma and Louise. In either case odds are you would have a more pleasant evening dropped into the scorpion pit, so just hope she will not want to just pick out the movie (by the way, if your progress in the relationship her hesitance to pick movies without discussion will dry up like paint. Eventually , you will watch Thelma and Louise).
This, however, does not give you license to subject her to the Wrath of Khan or whatever other sci fi movie you want (Khaaaaaaan image courtesy of the TV show t shirts). You need to engage in a dialog, and understand that she will be judging you based on how you interact with her in this discussion. You have to dance along the thin line of not being a dominant jerk or a spineless wimp.
At this point I usually start off by suggesting 3-4 movies that would seem like good compromises. She will probably shoot the first three down, so keep the one you really want to watch for fourth. If she shoots down all your initial suggestions at that point ask her for her suggestions. If she says something like “I really want to see …!” you are pretty much committed to that and need to respond with “I haven’t seen (insert lame movie name here) but it looks interesting.” However, that would tread down the path of her being the controlling jerk. The best response is if she comes across with 3-4 suggestions of her own. Let her reel them off and then pick the one that has the highest chance of not making you pray for death. Try to not fall into the trap of suggesting other movies as if you drag this out your chances of saying the wrong thing or suggesting something stupid will increase dramatically.
Because I love doing these and feel like they are really funny, I am going to list off a number of movies and/or genres and what I think her opinion will be or what it says about her.
Titanic-this is a Billy Zane chick flick. If you suggest it you will look like you are pandering to her or possibly in the closet. If she suggests it she might just be that aforementioned sociopath. Also, as a rule try to avoid movies with guys that women swoon over. If she spends two hours watching weedy pretty boy Leonardo di Caprio die to save the girl you will look terrible in comparison, especially if you failed to put yourself between her and the creepy homeless person the other night.
The Empire Strikes Back-or any of the Star Wars franchise. If you even suggest this flick you will most likely never hear from her again. If she suggests it try to discretely determine if she was actually born a man, or possibly had a brain transplant of some kind. If she is in fact female and suggested this film than prepare to either marry her or receive the heartbreak of your life when the perfect woman dumps you.
Generic chick flicks-if you suggest this see the listing for Titanic. I guarantee she will suggest at least one as a test of your machismo. Don’t fall into that trap or you will end up with a new friend and no sex.
I gotta run, but I will do more of these tomorrow. Have a great day.
Unsung genius Daniel Pinkwater
So a couple weeks I was out with a special person in my life and we stopped Pegasus Books in Rockridge, a suburb of Oakland. While there I looked at some used books and came across The Education of Robert Nifkin, by Daniel Pinkwater. I read the book this week, and was reminded of what a genius the man really is.
My being a Pinkwater fanboy goes way back. When I was about 14 my family was on one of our horrible never ending camping trips. You see, my dad would pile all of us into his ’69 Ford Maverick (replacement for the old Dodge my mom “accidentally” set fire to) every couple years during the summer and we would drive from one end of the country to the other, sleeping in crappy WWII era army surplus sleeping bags and a big dumb tent, usually on rocks and rattlesnakes. Dad would burn himself at least once a trip on his Coleman stove and the car would break down at least a couple times. To this day these trips remain one of the great mysteries of my life, as I for the life of me I can’t get what any of us got out of it, especially the old man. He did nothing but bitch and moan the whole time (or argue with mom), my sister hated it (and would relieve her boredom by torturing me), and I liken it to what I imagined hell would be like (early visions of hell. I was destined to learn what hell was really like when I dropped out of college and worked graveyard shift in a medical lab).
Anyway, we would be on these trips for a month or more and I had nothing to do but count cars, listen to my parents fight, or books (my dad was not big on car games or, for that matter, anything that involved noise from the back seat). As an added bonus the Maverick did not have a functioning radio. So while on one of these trips I picked up the only book that looked remotely interesting at a stand in a truck stop, The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, by Daniel Manus Pinkwater.
To say the book was an eye opening experience is an understatement. I had been a avid reader for a while by then but most of the books I read were about adults. The vast majority of “young adult” novels about kids in high school or grammar school were pretty Norman Rockwell-esqe. More or less good kids with good attitudes who were generally well adjusted, happy young Americans. This book was about a couple of chubby introverted kids who hated school, were generally more intelligent than everyone around them, and had weird, messed up family lives. It was like I had discovered my long lost brothers. For the first time in my life I felt slightly less alienated rather than more.
Of course, the kids had some wild adventures involving the worlds greatest detective, a professional wrestler named the Mighty Gorilla, the terror of orangutans, a former South American army major expelled for terrorizing chickens, and a massive thinking computer hooked up to a giant avocado (of death). To say Pinkwater injects a level of surrealism into most of his stories is a bit of an understatement.
Anyway, his books are technically done for young adults, although honestly they are better read as an adult IMO. Also, some of his young adults smoke, drink, and play massive amounts of hooky, so maybe not the best for the soft brains of American youth. Nevertheless, each is in it’s own way brilliant.
What makes them even better are the titles. Here are a few of the better ones that I have read: Fat Men from Space, Lizard Music, Alan Mendleson the Boy From Mars, Wallpaper from Space, Blue Moose; and Return Of The Moose, Spaceburger : A Kevin Spoon and Mason Mintz Story, Fish Whistle: Commentaries, Uncommontaries and Vulgar Excesses, Jolly Roger, A Dog Of Hoboken, and I Was A Second Grade Werewolf are a few good ones, but he has dozens.
Anyway, if you hated high school, were a geek, didn’t fit in, and enjoy surrealism I’d say try out Daniel Pinkwater. If you were popular, fit in well, were well liked, and actually got laid in high school than go jump off a bridge. (Saved By the Bell Bayside AV Club image courtesy of the TV show t shirts)
I’ll be watching Furious Five tonight, I think, which will probably make for a pretty good review tomorrow, although I am headed to a small Warhammer tournament so I don’t know when I will write it up. Thanks for reading, and have a great day.
Who is Doctor Who and other interesting questions.
I have watched some episodes of Dr. Who and liked it a lot, but this morning I received an email from my best friend with a number of interesting questions about the show that I don’t feel qualified to answer. I think I can answer about half of these well, but the rest all pretty much defy my experience. Also, I think this is pretty funny, even as a fan. If you have any answers please feel free to respond or email me at [email protected].
(By the way, I know enough about the Doctor to know that this Matt Smith t-shirt is not exactly the optimal choice, as David Tennant was a lot more popular, although Matt seems to be gaining in popularity from what I have seen. T shirt image thanks to the TV show t shirt category)
“Dead Dave,
I’m looking for a simple explanation of what Dr Who is about and why people have been watching it for over 47 years. From what I’ve read and heard, there’s no reason why a Sham-wow infomercial looped over 25 years wouldn’t be as interesting.
Here’s what I have after talking to Greg last night and trying to read the Wiki and Netflix pages:
The show is not funny .
The Dr is super smart but nearly always rendered helpless or confounded in every show.
The Dr doesn’t have a gun.
Everyone around the Dr gets kidnapped.
Each incarnation of Dr Who is more annoying than past Dr’s.
The Dr doesn’t die, just regenerates. Regenerates from what, not being dead?? Why regenerate a perfectly good body??
There’s no special effects.
There are no scary villains.
The Dr. has no defined purpose. Like Quincy or Murder She Wrote, things just happen around him.
There are no hot girls nude, nor are there hot girls with clothes on.
Each episode costs about .37 cents to produce & it shows.
There is no good place to start watching the show. Either you were born and raised to it or you’ll never get it without watching all the shows.
Time Travel get’s it’s own category:
I feel like I’ve been left out because it seems that the show is really boring. I sure would like to understand what it is I’m missing. At the suggestion of one of the guys from work who lives in London, I’m going to start watching the 2005 season.
Anything you can add to clarify?”
I will answer a couple that are pretty simple. TARDIS is an acronym that stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. It looks like a police call box because the chameleon circuit has malfunctioned and is more or less stuck. Incidentally, the Tardis weighs something like 50,000 pounds. The reason no one can walk in and steal the time ride is each Tardis is biologically imprinted with the owner, in this case Doctor Who. Not sure how he got it imprinted. I haven’t seen that episode. Also the Doctor has a key that can lock the door.
As for the scary villains, I think some of them are quite scary. Here is a list of the top 5 worst Doctor Who villains. Anyway, if anyone else has a comment for my friend feel free to post a reply. Thanks for your help.
TV shows I loved as a kid but that kind of suck to watch now: the Greatest American Hero
So I am not really feeling the dating advice tonight and don’t want to force it. I considered going to see a movie and writing a review of it, but there seems to be a dearth of movies worth even worth considering unless I happened to catch a bad case of Bieber Fever, the only fever known to medical science to be caused by brain damage instead of the other way around. Instead I am going to explore an interesting phenomenon in my life: TV shows I loved as a kid that when I go back and watch now are really kind of painful to watch. (Knight Rider t-shirt courtesy of the TV t shirts category)
This is a weird thing to me, as it only seems to apply to TV shows. Movies that I watched as a kid I can go back and watch again and love and appreciate all over again. A few months ago I watch Goonies again and came away with a great feeling and a desire to listen to Cyndi Lauper. Last month I saw Time Bandits and loved it. Yet somehow whenever I go back and watch an old TV show it really looks painfully bad.
I think this may actually be a criticism of modern movies rather than a simple bitch about old TV shows. The fact is I think television has evolved into a much more polished and well written product, while movies, for all the technological advancement, have not really advanced much in terms of stories and cliches. Since TV shows have to have an extended lifespan and pull in advertising dollars there is a serious motivation to have at least the basic premise functional. Also, they seem to react better to current trends in pop culture. Movies only have to survive long enough to make it to international distribution, so it doesn’t really matter how much they suck (cough cough Season of the Witch cough cough). Therefore, the motivation to evolve just isn’t there (thank you Darwin).
Anyway, this concept was driven home about two years ago. As a kid growing up in the sucktastic 80’s I ran into this show, the Greatest American Hero. It was about a high school teacher named Ralph Hinkley who is given a suit by aliens that gives him super powers. The problem is he manages to lose the instruction manual (and really, which of us hasn’t done this) and has to figure it out through painful trail and error. He is supposed to help humans with it. The suit makes him bulletproof (sort of. He is never sure if it covers his entire body or just the part covered by the suit, so there are many humorous scenes where someone is shooting at him and he is covering his face with his arms like a girl getting spit wads shot at her), can fly, gives him super strength, and all sort of other powers that crop up as he screws around with the suit, kind of like having you car clock wrong six months every year until you figure out the RPS button will allow you to change the clock (not that I am speaking from personal experience, but really, I am).
He is teamed up with an FBI agent named Bill Maxwell (played by the great Robert Culp) and his super hot lawyer girlfriend Pam Davidson. On paper this sounds brilliant. Super hero? Super powers? FBI agent? Aliens? Hot lawyer girlfriend? Sounds like a recipe for the greatest American tv show.
So I loved it as a kid and two years ago was looking around Best Buy and saw a beautiful tin box collectors set that had all episodes, tons of extra features, and a heat transfer logo to make your own costume for the unlikely price of like $29.99. I bought it and hustled home to throw it on my TV.
That’s where the disappointment set it. The opening scene, which was Bill Maxwell’s friend being gunned down by terrorists that I remembered as really cool, was horrible done. All the dialogue sucked. The story sucked. The hair was all that really bad super trendy big 80’s hair that turns my stomach. I’m not going to be one of those tools who bitches about special effects done 30 years ago, but I can watch the original Star Wars from 1977 and still see some decent and believable special effects, so from that perspective the special effects sucked. Pam Davidson, who I remember as being really hot in the show, now looks like a middle aged housewife (with really big hair) when seen through my adult eyes. Everyone was wearing bad 80’s clothing. I can’t put my finger on it, but there was something in either the editing or camera work that is really jarring and disjointed. Overall very disappointing.
I put the boxed set back on my shelf after three lousy episodes. I guess this should be counted as a lesson learned, but I am reasonably sure that if I were to come across the same boxed set deal for Airwolf, Rip Tide, Magnum PI, the A Team, Knight Rider, Mork and Mindy, the Dukes of Hazard, TJ Hooker, Max Headroom, WKRP in Cincinnati, Miami Vice, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Married with Children, Night Court, Murphy Brown, Baywatch, or MacGuyver I would probably buy it with similar results. Oh, well. At least it would give me something to blog about.
Anyway, enough of this. Next post will be more interpreting online dating images. As for yesterday’s who-would-win question, Batman versus Darth Vader, the obvious answer is Vader as he could probably just force choke Batman to death. However, I have a lot of faith in Batman’s ability to overcome amazing odds. I believe given enough time to plan and prepare he would find a way to overcome the Dark Sith Lord, especially know that I know what an emo wienie he is under all that armor.
For today, I ask another mismatch that I think could go a different way if you think about it. Who would win, a single Star Trek Red Shirt armed with phaser against Tweekie with Dr. Theopolis?
