Pancake City

I don’t think it’s possible to know whether a movie will be good by an ad in a newspaper. But I do think it’s possible to know whether it will be bad by that ad.

Case study: Superhero Movie, a spoof on superhero movies starring Leslie Nielsen.

Sounds promising, yes? The superhero genre is a rich vein to mine, and Leslie Nielsen is a funny guy. But I fear the movie is absolutely horrible, based solely on an ad for it that I saw in The Washington Post. Read the rest of this entry »

The post title is my cheesy way of getting Google hits. Although it would help if I wrote “Lost” or “NCAA Tournament” instead of “The Tick.”

“The Tick” is one of my all-time favorite TV shows. It only ran for one season, but it was well-done and often hilarious. Hulu, a wonderful, free online TV and movie streaming service, has all nine episodes up. The series has so many good lines in it that if it were a little more popular when it first aired, people would still be repeating them today.

On another note, we have an early nomination for Crappiest Movie of the Year. I’ll bet someone $5 it doesn’t break 20% on RottenTomatoes.com

***
The Tick: Owwwww! My head feels like it’s… like it’s gunna have a baby.
Arthur: It’s called a headache.
The Tick: It has a name?

Arthur: Toilets don’t talk!
The Tick: Well that’s a maybe in my book, chum.

Did the computer graphic artists go on strike at the same time as the writers? The CG intro was horrible, I think it was rendered on a Playstation 2.

“Print is dead.”

– Dr. Egon Spengler, Ghost Busters, 1984.

I saw “The King of Kong” a few days ago, and wrote a short user review for Netflix (review below). My lukewarm reaction may be entirely due to the high expectations I had, both from critic raves and my own fondness for these types of documentaries.  There are also some arguments over the movie’s details I read after watching it that make me question the degree of its accurateness. Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

“The movie’s best moment is its two-and-a-half minute preview. There, the elements of the story are stripped down–egotistical manic versus likable, down-on-his-luck Joe–and the twists and turns of their battle is left to the imagination. The actual movie doesn’t live up to the promise. The succession of interviews with the socially awkward and singularly focused give off an insular feeling that the film makers don’t do enough to overcome. Friends, this is what true nerd-dom is, and it’s not pretty. Also, the film makers mishandle a few dramatic moments and leave the narrative muddy in others. It’s not bad and worth seeing for fans of quirky documentaries, but doesn’t reach the heights of similar documentaries before it.”

I finally watched “Transformers”, directed by Michael Bay. It is the type of movie that if I don’t write about it now, I never will because I already forgot half of it and I just finished it five minutes ago.

Crap. I just spent five minutes after writing the above sentences trying to remember what snide comments I was about to make, and all that’s left in my head is “Poosh”. If you don’t know, poosh is the culminate sound of two hours of car crashes, explosions, missile fire, and blown-up buildings all compressed into one second. Michael Bay made my brain go poosh.

The experience was exactly like watching “Memento”, where time was sliced into a dozen pieces and the fragments rearranged out of order, casting doubt on the existence of narrative yet cohesive enough to motivate one to search for it.

Actually, the experience was nothing like watching “Memento.” This is a better analogy. My brain felt like an asteroid hitting another asteroid, which then hit a third asteroid, and then somehow the asteroids rearrange their flight paths so they all start spinning in unison and plummet together towards Earth.

That is also the beginning sequence of Transformers, except there is also a melodramatic voice-over about how Earth is in danger from the Decepticons who want the All Spice so they can season Earth with their evil and then, I dunno, buy a time share and summer in Maine.

I was 100% prepared for a fun but brainless movie when I rented Transformers. Where I erred was not checking the running time beforehand. I saw the Netflix sleeve and thought, “Crap, two and a half hours? That’s a long time for a bad movie.”

When you are watching a movie that turns time into an abyss with no ledges to anchor oneself, 1 hour and 22 minutes is the same as 2.5 hours. except the latter fosters more pee breaks and thoughts like, “Why is the robot talking like Martin Lawrence from ‘Bad Boys II’?”

Ooh, I remembered a thought! Michael Bay passed up an amazing opportunity for a joke. This opportunity was so amazing, that in spite of what I wrote, I would have become a Michael Bay fan for life if he had made this joke.

It was the scene where High School Guy Who Looks 25 and High School Girl Who Already Had Plastic Surgery were meeting the Autobots for the first time.

High School Guy asked Optimus Prime how the Autobots know slang. (Let’s ignore the ridiculousness of this question, or why his first question wasn’t “HOW THE FUCK DID YOU CRAZY TALKING ROBOTS GET HERE?”) Optimus Prime said, “We learned it from the Internet.”

What a great set-up for a joke. You can draw from one of many areas of Internet linguistic oddness: l33t speak, IM chat, penis enhancement spam, and so on. What does one of the Autobots say to show off his Internet language?

“This looks like a cool place to kick it!” Wow. Move more, Mr. T. “Jazz” of the Autobots is here.

Here’s what would have made me a Michael Bay fan for life:

GUY: “Where did you learn English?”
OPTIMUS PRIME: “The World Wide Web.”
JAZZ: “I CAN haz cheezburger.” (1 2 3)

A large, muscular android stands on a metal platform. Thin rings of metal rotate in mid-air around him, glowing with increasingly intensity as they spin into a blur. A loud hum emanates from the rings; they glow blindly white and fill the room with an unearthly glow. The glow quickly dies and the rings dematerialize; the cybernetic organism is gone.

SKYNET ROBOT MANAGER: “Readings?”

SKYNET ROBOT SCIENTIST 1: “Temporal vortex successfully opened and closed.”

R. MANAGER: “No anomalies?”

SKYNET ROBOT SCIENTIST 2: “He’s back in 1984. Everything went just as planned.”

[ROBOT SCIENTIST 2 glances at R. SCIENTIST 1. They both snicker.]

R. MANAGER: “When did you two get laughter chips? Processing… forget it. Why are you laughing?”

R. SCIENTIST 1: “We’re just happy at the impeding death of John Connor and the human resistance.”

R. SCIENTIST 2: “Yeah. They’re going to feel naked without him.”

[R. SCIENTIST 1 + 2 break down and titter. R. MANAGER stiffly puts his metal hand on his hip and scans them with his red laser eye.]

R. MANAGER: 75123-XL! 75312-XV! You tell me what you did to the Terminator right now!

R. SCIENTIST 1: “We sent him back to 1984 without his clothes.”

R. MANAGER: “By the mother of Matrix!”

R. SCIENTIST 2: “Relax, it’s funny. Just imagine how pissed off he is going to be.” [mimicking Austrian accent] “I am the Ter-min-ah-tor. I must kill Sar-ah Conh-or. Where are my Ter-min-ah-tor pants?”

R. SCIENTIST 1: “He’ll use it as motivation. I bet he’ll be so angry he’ll kill someone in the first five minutes of when he arrives.”

R. MANAGER: “I’d mark you two for reprocessing if you hadn’t done so much to get us here.” [MANAGER becomes lost in thought for 0.347 seconds.] “At least he has weapons and ammo. That will make the job easier.”

ROBOT SCIENTIST 1+2 look uneasy.

R. MANAGER: “What. Is. It.”

R. SCIENTIST 1: “He’ll have weapons and ammo…unless he was keeping them in his clothes.”

R. MANAGER: “You’re telling me we sent our only humanoid cybernetic model for the most important mission in robot history with no weapons, ammo, or clothes?”

R. SCIENTIST 2: “We’re sorry. We didn’t think it through.”

R. MANAGER: “ ‘Didn’t think it through?’ We’re robots. We think everything through. That’s what we do.”

R. SCIENTIST 1: “We’re really sorry, Boss.”

R. MANAGER: “Sorry. Huh. You better hope that’s all you are. If this prank ends up ruining the mission, I’m melting you two personally and using your liquefied insides for the next model.”

R. MANAGER storms out of the room.

R. SCIENTIST 2: “Do you think he was serious?”

R. SCIENTIST 1: “Naw. We should call in tomorrow with a virus though. Just in case.”

This might become a regular feature.

My sisters Michele and Tina encouraged me to write another Netflix review. I decided if I do this, I’m only reviewing movies I don’t like or think I wouldn’t like based on the most superficial criteria possible. This review is for the animated children’s movie, Happy Feet.

Maybe these stupid penguins would have more time to find fish if they stopped singing Britney Spears-esque musical numbers every five minutes. I couldn’t tell if the tunes were original or ripped wholesale from “Best of Dance Hits, Vol. 3″ (only $9.99, check your telly at 3:30 a.m. for the details).

The concept doesn’t even make sense. “Let’s take a group of animals that all look alike + have extremely tiny feet, and make a musical about them, the success of which will depend on visually stunning footwork and compelling, distinct characters.”

The moral tacked on the end is also nonsensical. “We should save the animals, as long as they entertain us.” What? Here’s my alternate ending: if I see 4,000 penguins dancing in unison, I’m not petitioning the U.N. to end fishing in the Antarctic. I’m grabbing a shotgun and a bag of grenades, because those aren’t Emperor penguins, they’re Hitler penguins, and they need to die.

I woke up today with a brilliant idea: I’ll write short, sarcastic move reviews on Netflix, preferably for movies I haven’t seen but I’m pretty sure suck.

Errnt. Reviews must be at least 80 characters. Errnt. Words must be less than 25 characters. I have a decent vocabulary, but not 25-letter decent. I figured out the problem: errnt, Netflix does not like paragraph breaks. A stumbling block, because to get over the 80 character minimum, I wrote a haiku.

I removed the paragraph breaks, creating a jumble of barely readably text. Finally, errnt: “Review submission error.”

I give up. Movie reviewer career over. Snideness diverted to web page. Here is the review on “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days”:

Day 1: Show him this movie. Done. ***

Since Netflix requires a minimum of 80 characters in review, and hates paragraph breaks, I present for you all, a poorly-formatted haiku:

Film predictable *** Are they going to fall in love? *** Yes, Pope is Catholic

DC’s free, outdoor movie festival Screen on the Green started last week. Tonight’s movie was “The Thing from Another World,” a 1951 science-fiction flick about an alien that crashes at the North Pole and terrorizes a small army outpost there.

The movies at Screen on the Green are older flicks and they vary in quality, but all of them have surprised me in some way. Last year, I was watching a ho-hum musical with decent songs and a typical presentation, when out of nowhere three of the main characters dress as baby triplets and then sing a song about how they want to kill each other. It was like watching a 2048 future episode of Jerry Springer.

SPRINGER: “Ton-Ton, why do you want to kill your siblings, Ixy and Granger?”
TON-TON: “Cause they be taking all my neural implants, Jerry! Mmm, hmm.”

“The Thing from Another World” was interesting for a few reasons. It was the first alien to appear in a movie, starting a long and continuing chain of movies that use aliens as metaphors for foreign threats. And this blood-thirsty plant-based monster that wears a belt and lumberjack pants is definitely a threat.

When the military in the base take a “It looks scary, kill it” policy, the dispassionate, head scientist argues that their lives mean nothing in comparison to the knowledge they could gain from the alien, and they need to address the alien as a friend, not an enemy. At which point the scientist might have well rolled himself in butter and breadcrumbs, because that whiny, out-of-touchy pencil neck just put himself on the Monster Menu, under Main Course.

Also, I suspect several of the movie’s stylistic techniques inspired “Alien” and other future sci-fi action movies.

The dialog was surprisingly snappy and fast-paced, similar to an Aaron Sorkin-written show. The military characters, who drove the action in the movie, talked in clipped sentences and overlapped the beginnings and ends of each other sentences. It held up well and must have been innovative 55 years ago.

They track the monster is a Geiger counter, which beeps faster the closer the monster is. That trick is still being used in movies to heighten tension. Finally, the movie tries to portray the alien as having some intelligence, like when the alien shuts off the station’s oil supply so they freeze to death.

It’s not believable though. The alien looks really stupid. He’s not even wearing a smoking jacket. Then he walks very, very slowly into an obvious trap. That must have felt good: travel millions of miles to conquer the Earth, and then get outwitted by a group of high school graduates who are squatting down ten feet in front of him and waiting for the monster to walk into an electrical fence.

I first assumed the alien was a metaphor for a looming foreign threat, but now I wonder if it’s more of a retelling of World War II. The characters are unaware of the threat at first. The scientists argue strongly that they should try to reason and engage the alien first. The military adopts a more practical approach, deciding early that it is an enemy and trying to kill it before it can cause more damage.

In the end, the scientists are proven wrong, but it is science that allows them to destroy the alien.

Finally saw Borat. It’s very funny, but not what I expected. My preconception was that, at its heart, the movie was a social satire, subversively illuminating people’s hidden (and not-so-hidden) prejudice and stereotypes as Sasha Baren Cohen travels through America.

While that’s part of the movie, I found the movie’s center to be shock comedy above everything else. Sometimes the shock came from Borat saying something outlandish (and usually anti-Semitic), but much more often it was something else entirely: nude wrestling, stumbling in an antique store, the Pamela Anderson scene, and so on.

What social commentary the movie offers is more on how people react to outlandish statements from a stranger: usually with indifference or a conscious ignoring of the remark, out of uncertainty or a desire to avoid confrontation.

The movie paints a muddy picture in this regard. When Borat enters a gun shop and asks the owner “What’s the best gun to kill a Jew?”, I found it difficult to judge the owner’s matter-of-fact answer. Did he understand Borat and have no problem with what he said? Did he feel disturbed but decided to ignore the comment out of misguided politeness, or that he was more concerned with making a sale? Did he rationalize what he heard, like “He can’t seriously want to kill a Jewish person. He must mean something else by ‘Jew’.”?

I think one’s view of scenes like this has more to do with one’s opinion on human nature, whether it be cynical or optimistic, than anything else. These scenes are too short and edited to offer a definite conclusion. It puts the movie in the odd place of needing its DVD release, with substantial extended scenes, to fully answer these questions, and perhaps lay a true claim to the land of social commentary.

If you think men go to extremes to get sex, you don’t know bears.

In Grizzly Man, Warner Herzog’s documentary of a man who lived with grizzly bears every summer for over a decade, Herzog says that some male grizzly bears will kill their cubs so the female will be ready to fornicate sooner.

Talk about a mood killer.

My one sentence review: Saved by the last 10 minutes.

My desire to move out of my Mom’s house is debatable by the fact that I signed up for Netflix’s free two-week trial and arranged all my speakers so the sound waves would form a nexus directly over my bed, on which a bank of pillows has been thoughtfully placed.

It’s been a while since I’ve rented a lot of movies, so I need some recommendations. First, here are mine:

Movie theater: Little Miss Sunshine. It’s hilarious, heartfelt and lives up to the glowing reviews.

Rentals: Full Metal Alchemist. It’s a Japanese anime series (English dubbed) about two young brothers on a request to restore their bodies into their original, human form. I watched 13 1/2-hour episodes so far and it keeps getting better. The series’ creators wholly adapted the language of film, and it shows up in all facets of the story telling, from the camera angles used to the evocative music.

Dodgeball: Ben Stiller: Evil Dodgeball guy. Vince Vaughn: Good Dodgeball Guy. That’s pretty much the whole movie. The movie has a lot of funny, silly moments that somehow makes its formulatic elements more comforting than annoying. If this movie were a food, it would be pizza.

Battlestar Galatica: If you like TV science fiction, this is your best bet. Hot pilots, gripping drama, and robots. What more could a sci-fi fan ask for?

Jim Gaffigan: Beyond the Pale. I’ve watched the shortened Comedy Central version of his stand-up three times. Besides the fact that his jokes are hilarious, I admire him for choosing to be funny without using crutches like cursing or taking cheap shots at ethnic groups.

Okay, so what do you recommend? Post a comment with your picks.