FDR: American Badass!

2012 historical comedy

Rating: 7/20

Plot: Roosevelt fights Nazi werewolves, straight from the history books.

This movie has its moments, and Brian Bostwick and Ray Wise are good as the titular president and MacArthur respectively. Unfortunately, this thing is just so cheap. And I mean "cheap" in every single sense of the word. The effects are cheap--CGI explosions that I bet my son could make and pasted-on werewolf fur. The humor is cheap, a lot of dick jokes and polio jokes that are the sort of thing I hate the television show Family Guy for. And cheap puns. Marco Polio and a play on "debriefing" somebody. This was written by the guy behind that wiffleball movie  I watched earlier this year. Ross Patterson is his name, and he has a small part in this one, too. I think this guy's got some potential as both an actor and a writer, but he's got to learn to channel things and probably mature a bit. He's probably a little too South Park-inspired for his own good. He could also, of course, use a little more money to work with. There's a whole lot of ugliness here, definitely more than laughs. One scene probably typifies this most:

FDR has just had an affair in which his mistress squirted ketchup and mustard on his "tiny little polio legs" because, I guess, they resemble hot dogs. Eleanor pops in and says, "What the shit?" There's a bit of an argument which ends in Eleanor saying, "Tell them a rainbow took a shit on your legs." Now, I could be completely wrong. That might be historically accurate. Or it could just be completely tasteless. Either way, it makes me wonder why I watched this.

Atomic Cafe

1982 documentary

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A compilation of bomb testing footage, important people saying things, propaganda films, and atomic bomb survival videos from the 40s-60s. Uncle Sam's message was very clear: American citizens don't really have to worry about the atomic bomb, especially if they happen to be turtles.

When I was a kid, nuclear war was on my mind all the time, so a lot of this footage is kind of terrifying. A lot more of it is disgusting or creepy, and a lot of it is hilarious, and that's what makes this such an enjoyable movie experience. All of this sans narration makes it work so much better. It's there, objectively, and although what the filmmakers have chosen to give us might be subjective, the chronological look at the history of the big bomb is really just there for the viewer to put the pieces together on their own. The propaganda films seem so tasteless sixty years after. Blowing up Statues of Liberty, small Wisconsin town exploitation, island natives near bomb testing sites completely understanding exactly what is going on while "You Are My Sunshine" is used in the background. It's enough to make any freedom-loving American sick to his stomach. And then you add a shot of a giggling Truman right before his "two billion dollar gamble" announcement or a crowd laughing after Nagasaki's described as looking "like Ebbet's Field after a double header with the Giants," and it makes you wonder who the bad guys really were. It definitely makes one feel really good about our government. Luckily, there's no dishonesty in our present times. As I mentioned, this isn't all gloomy. The nuclear protection get-ups are often hilarious, and that "God Will Hit Like an Atomic Bomb" song is about the catchiest thing you'll ever hear. "Everybody's worried about the atomic bomb, but nobody's worried about the day my lord will come." This is just stuffed with images that will forever be tattoed in the mind. I don't think I'll ever forget that testing video footage that showed soldiers running toward a mushroom cloud.

How dumb were kids growing up in the 50s and 60s, by the way? Duck and cover? I can imagine what my smartass middle schoolers would say to something like that. And I know how dumb they are!

Fantasy Mission Force

1982 action movie

Rating: 6/20

Plot: It's World War II, and the Japanese, while attempting to take over the world, have already captured the leaders of France, Germany, England, and America. The latter, it should be mentioned, is Abraham Lincoln. Officials get together to find somebody who can save them and decide that Lieutenant Don Wen is their man. Rejected heroes: "Snake" Plissken, James Bond (the Roger Moore one, if you care), and Rocky Balboa who is not suitable for military action. Wen assembles a ragtag crew to save the world.

Lots of weirdness here with varying degrees of entertainment value. First, if you really need a coherent plot with your action movies, you've just got to avoid this one. It's episodic, and none of the individual episodes really go together in a way that makes sense. Not only that, the individual scenes don't really make much sense on their own. Not to say that this doesn't entertain because bits and pieces of it manage to do just that. You get a musical number, some Benny Hill speeded-up weirdness, a bunch of masked flying Amazon women wielding ribbons, Jackie Chan fighting while holding a chicken, some hopping zombie things, disembodied hands and ghost women in a haunted house, and some Nazi Japanese riding on hoopties that look like they're straight out of a post-apocalyptic action flick. I expected Mel Gibson to waltz in and demand gasoline or something. Almost all of the humor in this falls completely flat, and the characters aren't really interesting at all. Except one: Brigitte Lin's (Bride with White Hair) great as Lily, all in leather and thigh-high boots, winning drinking contests like Indiana Jones' girlfriend and waxing acrobatically. She's fun to watch, as is a fight sequence with Jackie Chan (not really the star of this, by the way) at the end. Ultimately, this one is just too confusing and goofy to be completely entertaining. I'm also pretty positive that this isn't really all that historically accurate either.

Urine Couch AM Movie Club: Unstoppable

2010 train mayhem

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Earl's brother from the Hey! I'm Earl television sitcom screws up and loses his train, a locomotive hauling a few cars with some deadly-dangerous stuff that, if it spills off the track in some Pennsylvania town like they think it will, could potentially destroy the earth. Thank God for Denzel Washington, a train conducting veteran who, with the help of an arrogant young buck, is there to save the day.

This is the best tall tale that has both a black guy and something to do with trains since John Henry! I halfway enjoyed half of this movie. It's predictable as an action movie. There are also too many scenes with people doing work which reminded me that I was supposed to be doing work and nearly ruined the good time that I was having there on the Urine Couch with the late Gene Siskel. My mind started wandering a bit as jittery action sequences started bleeding into more jittery action sequences which bled into quiet reflective scenes where Denzel and the kid talk about their lives. I started wondering if I'd be able to take care of business if the motel started to move, gaining momentum as it merged with traffic on 465. Would I be able to stop the thing? And would some of our weekly guests be considered toxic? Like, if we tumbled off 465 into traffic on 65, would we explode in a cloud of cocaine and filth, forcing Indianapolis inhabitants to evacuate the city in a search for cleaner air? Regardless, I bet we'd make the news. We'll likely make the news soon enough anyway. Our rivals down the street did after their manager, another Indian guy, was beaten to death and thrown in a dumpster. I can definitely see that happening at my place. What are the chances of two Indiana Indian hotel managers being murdered within a couple weeks of each other? I hope angry customers don't try to beat me and throw me in a dumpster. Or if it happens, I hope Denzel Washington pops out and saves my life, all with really jerky editing and multiple camera angles showing him ripping stop signs from the concrete and swinging them at the bad guys. I love that in movies like Unstoppable, by the way. It's like the director Tony Scott said, "Look, everybody. I've done a lot of these action movies and wasted a whole bunch of planes when doing Top Gun because the cameraman's thumb was in the shot or the explosion didn't look explosiony enough or whatever. We've only got so many trains and cars, so we've got to make this count" and then set up about fifty cameras to shoot the same shot of a huge train crashing into some cars. Then, he looked at the footage and said, "You know what? This is all good! We can't waste any of this shiznit!" and decided to use it all. All the shiznit. Seeing the same train-crashing-into-car scenes from the same angle, sometimes in slow motion, adds about thirty minutes to the movie. Without those extra camera angles, you'd be forced to either tell this story in about sixty minutes or add a lot more scenes of Denzel and the kid talking about life. Anyway, a lot of cardboard to chew through with this one.