Ted

2012 comedy

Rating: 9/20

Plot: Marky Mark refuses to grow up, spending all his free time smoking pot with his childhood friend--the titular teddy bear who was magically brought to life after the fairy from the Pinocchio story felt sorry for him because he was a loser and brought the stuffed animal to life. This puts a strain on his relationship with his girlfriend.

This is just a big game of "Let's see what crude things we can have a teddy bear do!" and I found it pretty annoying. I've never been a fan of The Family Guy, so I'm not really sure why I thought this might be funny. I guess it was knowing that there would be a teddy bear saying a lot of crude things and maybe, I predicted, having a sexual encounter with an adult female. I know, I'm not a genius for predicting that or anything. We all saw the previews, the perfect case where those could have just been repeated about thirty times to produce a similar result. I didn't anticipate the storyline being so predictable. And predictably lame. It's definitely too predictably pedestrian for a movie that features a talking teddy bear should be. I don't like Marky Mark anyway, and although I'll credit him with having a nice rapport with a CGI stuffed animal, I didn't like him here either. I also didn't like Mila Kunis's voice at all. I think she's supposed to be sexy or something. This is filled with gags that I am not going to remember in a year, and a lot of the targets it pushes around won't be around long enough for this to need to be seen in twenty years. It's nowhere near as funny as Gooby, another talking bear thing. In fact, I don't believe I laughed a single time. I laughed during Gooby just to try to keep myself sane.

This is about as well written as Ted, but I have an excuse: Rapid fire!

Cashback

2006 comedy

Rating: 10/20

Plot: An art student breaks up with his girlfriend, and combats insomnia by getting a part-time job at a supermarket. Later, he discovers that he has the ability to freeze time.

This movie's so boring that I actually started wondering in the early parts if the whole thing was an attempt by the director to help the viewer feel the protagonist's insomnia or something. It's slow going throughout, and my dislike of the main character probably didn't help. Neither did his constant narration. There were occasional humorous diversions, the best being the appearance of a sausage customer and the antics of two employees who passed their time doing anything they could that didn't involve work. It's cheap gags and a fair share of nudity under a cover of artsy-fartsiness, but naked old man drawing model flatulence poked holes through that sheet right from the get-go. This movie fails dramatically, comedically, and romantically, and all the points I'm giving this are for boobs.

Tromeo and Juliet

1996 Shakespeare adaptation

Rating: 13/20

Plot: See Romeo and Juliet but with more perversity. Or maybe less. Shakespeare was a pretty randy fellow.

 A first shot of what I believe was a hanged squirrel, Lemmy from Motorhead reciting the bard, nipple piercing, severed wiggling fingers, comical fart sounds, the "king of cold cuts," comical spousal abuse, lesbian cooks, outlandish dream sequences with penis monsters going "Rarr!", crossbow grenades, punk rockers, heads meeting fire hydrants, people carrying lizards inexplicably, guys in cow costumes, a meat factory, glass time-out rooms, bread thieves, pink bondage devices, meat hook suicide attempts, Hitler head bludgeons, guys pissing on other guys, car accidents, more severed limbs, more comical fart sounds, opium dens, hermaphroditic pig people, projectile vomit, exploding heads, incest, and a dream sequence with a spontaneous pregnancy featuring popcorn and rats that is the nuttiest thing I've seen in a long while. This ain't your English teacher's Shakespeare. There is some Shakespearean dialogue juxtaposed with the modern (well, then modern) urban slang, and that's pretty jarring. There are some lines that could be from the play. It's been a while since I read it.

"My name is Capulet. I got a corn nut for a dick. My name is Capulet. My asshole's full of worms."
"What do you think about my milkman costume, Juliet?"
"Get ready to die!" "It happens to everyone sooner or ladder." (Context is probably important for this one.)
"Now you've gone too far! Goddamn heads bouncing off of cars while families are singing 'Found a Peanut'!"
"I'm going to wipe you off the face of the earth like a piece of shit from God's ass."

A couple of those could be straight from Big Willie. That Lloyd Kaufman--independent film production company Troma's version of Shakespeare--sure is a goofball, and the ratio of gags that work and those that don't probably isn't all that good. However, there are so many ideas here that there is enough that works, and if you like John Waters or his imitators (like Lloyd Kaufman, for example), this might appeal to you. Troma fan will recognize a lot of the company's movie posters and a few costumes at a party which is either a nice touch or really cheap. If it's the latter, it matches the rest of the movie. This is not a great movie and feels much longer than it actually is, but it's kind of a cute bit of filth if you're into that sort of thing.

I might never hear "Found a Peanut" the same way again.

Hesher

2010 after-school special

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Dwight from The Office loses his wife, and he and his son are having difficulty coping. Dwight grows a beard while son T.J. obsesses over purchasing the car his mother was killed in from the junkyard. Dad mopes on the couch; T.J. deals with a bully who makes him lick urinals. Enter the titular uninvited guest, a long-haired tattooed rocker with a scary van and a dirty mouth. He makes a mess of everything.

I'm not sure if the poster is supposed to look like somebody left it in his pants pocket and accidentally sent it the washing machine or not, but I guess it fits. It's heavy metal and all, right? This movie and Gordon-Levitt go for attitude over substance, but this movie really felt flat to me, like an after-school special with a whole bunch of cussing. I kind of liked the titular character, more as a symbol than as an actual flesh 'n' blood slacker, but Gordon-Levitt is just a little too sure of himself here, leaning too heavily on the character's written antics and fuck-filled lines and not giving Hesher any real depth. Comically, it works though. The Star Wars trash compactor scene re-enactment is a hilarious bit of frantic genius. I also really liked the "on one condition" flatulence bit, something I might borrow for my personal life. Which might make the point since, as I said, he's really more of a symbol for this father and child anyway. Rainn Wilson's not bad in a more dramatic role, but he's got the same problem with a lot of sitcom stars with very recognizable faces--it's just hard to take him seriously. The youngster, Devin Brochu, really does a good job with an emotionally tough role. His character is put through quite a bit. Hell, he falls off his bicycle at least three times in this movie. I realize that's probably a little stuntman though unless Devin Brochu is the Tom Cruise of child actors or something. Natalie Portman's performance is dull, but it might have more to do with her character being pointless. Well, no. She's actually just not very good here. I didn't buy that character at all. Things are just implausible in this, and although the sentiments are nice, I just had too much trouble connecting with these characters and their story in a way that was meaningful.

The Garbage Pail Kids

1987 garbage pail movie

Rating: 3/20

Plot: A frequently-bullied, delusional kid accidentally frees the seven disgusting titular puppets from their garbage pail prison in a magician's antique store. They wreak havoc in disgusting and unfunny ways.

This came very close to being the first movie in the nearly four year history of this blog to be too embarrassing for me to admit that I watched. I could attempt to justify spending an hour and a half with this movie, one without a single redeeming value, by saying, "Well, I've seen it on some 'Worst Movie of All Time' lists, and I'm on a quest to find the worst movie of all time," but that wouldn't make it any less embarrassing. I could say, "Well, you know. It had puppets in it" or "Hey, I was watching it ironically!" or a variety of other things that would make it a little closer to OK that I watched this, but I don't think anything could make it OK that I watched this. Don't get me wrong! I did learn a couple valuable lessons from this thing: 1) Don't shake hands with Messy Tessy. 2) Don't watch anymore movies produced by the Topps baseball card company. Apparently, there is something more difficult to digest than that nasty gum they included in those card packs. Farts, projectile vomit, puppet rapping. If somebody shoved a copy of this into an 80's time capsule, likely to get rid of it so that none of their friends would catch them with it, then whoever digs that up is going to likely want to invent a time machine just to go back to the mid-80s and eliminate the race of man before this movie or any movie like it could be made. Here, I'll tell you a story to illustrate just how painful and embarrassing the experience of watching this movie is: I saw a can of Pepsi yesterday, remembered that the Pepsi company had for whatever reason decided to include a little product placement in this movie, remembered that I had watched this movie a few days ago, and attempted suicide by running head first into a cement wall. So this movie, out of the hundreds that I've seen and written about on this blog, came the closest to ending my life. True story.

Urine Couch AM Movie Club: The Cat in the Hat

2003 worst movie ever candidate

Rating: 1/20

Plot: It's pretty close to what happens in the book as far as I remember, at least for the first half. The biggest difference is that this is complete ass.

This is an hour and a half of complete unpleasantness and in my humble opinion one of the worst movies ever made. If Alec Baldwin, a guy I like, wasn't in this, I'd go ahead and say that everybody involved in the production of this should be executed. Slowly. I'm not a violent man at all and rarely have violent thoughts, but I'd be glad to pull the trigger, yank the switch, jab the instrument, toss the match, or whatever else it takes to do my part in keeping people like this from ever working again. I've recently seen Shrek about two dozen times, and I think I figured out what's wrong with the movie. I can hear Mike Myers in Shrek's voice, and Mike Myers makes me think of this atrocity and I want everybody to die.

This is the second time I've seen The Cat in the Hat. Siskel wanted to watch it because he's got a thing for Kelly Preston, an actress I want dead. And the beginning made me wonder if I was wrong about this movie. It's a nifty colorful start, a cool little Seussian world, albeit one with one of the worst narrators I've ever heard. But within seconds, the whole thing is excruciatingly painful, a headache-inducing affair that offends the ears, the eyes, and somehow even the taste buds. And any reasonable adult's sensibilities, of course. It's equal parts offensive and obnoxious. The warning signs are all there, and if Gene wasn't there and if a tent wasn't pitched in my trousers following one of the sexiest scenes in the history of cinema involving the aforementioned Preston (my new sexual fantasy: Kelly Preston vacuuming me), I would have shut this thing off and tried my best to forget that it existed. It's similar to what I wish I could do with the Holocaust actually. But those warning signs: 1) Uh oh. Children. Bad acting ones at that. One's Dakota Fanning and the other is Spencer Breslin if you want to make some kind of hit list yourself. 2) Uh oh. A dog with too much personality. It's the lazy filmmaker's way of going for cuteness. 3) Uh oh. Go ahead and double up on that animals-with-personality thing with a talking CGI fish voiced by Sean Hayes who also plays the boss and has the annoying catchphrase "You're fiiiiiirrrrrrred-duh!" and who I would like to be dead.

The soundtrack is relentless. David Newman--the guy you get when you can't afford Randy, I'm guessing--has a score-composing philosophy: every single thing that appears on the screen needs to be punctuated with music. The music is constant, highlighting the crap.

Not bad enough? Well, let's add a little cultural stereotyping. Actually, no. Let's add a ton of cultural stereotypes. And speaking of cultural stereotypes, why does the titular cat sound like an old Jewish woman through the movie? That's when he's not imitating the Kool-aide man with the big catchphrase from the film, the one that was supposed to sell Burger King kid meals or put asses in the theater seats--"Oh yeah!" C'mon, writers. Is that the best you can do? Oh yeah? Of course that beats the babysitter pun (something a three-year-old could have come up with--"She sits on babies?") or the "Oh my cod!" line or the hilarious "dirty ho" gag. Oh yeah! All while the cat uses more props than "comedian" Carrot Top. Only Carrot Top is funnier, and that's a sentence I never ever thought I would write. And just when you think the movie can't get any more annoying, they surprise you by throwing in Thing 1 and Thing 2. You know, cause the movie wasn't nearly loud enough before.

You want references to the penis or testicles, farts and belching used for laughs, urine gags, thinly-veiled allusions to sex, or characters on more than one occasion saying "Son of a _____"? This is the movie for you. You can watch this trash with your kid and then wonder why all your kid's teachers hate his guts.

There's a scene in this movie where the cat is hanging from a tree and kids are hitting him because they think he's a pinata. I don't remember for sure, but I'd guess they hit him right in the nutsack because that's the type of thing Dr. Seuss would have thought was hilarious. I wish there would have been some kind of Brandon Lee-type mishap where Mike Myers was beaten to death during the filming of that scene. It would have been a worthy punishment.

This is the worst Dr. Seuss adaptation, and that is saying quite a bit. It's not only that, it's an absolute insult to the writer. Why spend this much money making something that made me want to gouge out my eyes? Wouldn't it have been a lot cheaper just to drive to Dr. Seuss's grave and urinate on it?

And Alec Baldwin? What are you doing? Nice suit, by the way.

Sins of the Fleshapoids (plus The Secret of Wendel Samson and The Craven Sluck)

1965-1967

Rating: n/r

Plot: Sins of the Fleshapoids takes place in a far distant future after a nuclear holocaust. The titular Fleshapoids are the robot slaves of the survivors. The titular sins involve Fleshapoids falling in love in copulating. In The Secret of Wendel Samson, the titular protagonist struggles with his sexuality. And I don't really know what The Craven Sluck is about.

The Craven Sluck? What a title! These three shorts (they add up to an hour and a half of mayhem) were artfully constructed by the Kuchar twins, writer/director/actor siblings who were apparently an influence on John Waters. They're fascinating little cheapos, like B-movie art films. There's a nifty mix of deranged ideas and the sort of filmmaking where you can sort of see an artistic vision that isn't quite allowed to surface due to the budget constraints or general ineptitude. With Sins, you get the longest title screen I've ever seen and some opening credits with drawings that look like they're straight from Napolean Dynamite's notebook. Then, the movie, and you quickly realize that this movie is going nowhere quickly. There's an enthusiastic narrator who makes the whole thing sound like it's a documentary, but the characters don't talk at all. Well, that's not true. They talk but not audibly. Instead, the Kuchars utilize (first I've ever seen this) talking bubbles! You know, those comic strip bubbles with wonderfully written gems like "Obey me or I'll wet you and make you rust!" Or, check out this great dialogue:

Guy Fleshapoid: We are robots yet we are in love.
Girl Fleshapoid: Let us now make love.

I know what you're thinking, and yes, that's pretty hot on its own. But the ensuing sex scene with finger lightning? Oh, my! The most beautiful bit of narration in this, so poetic that it'll make your heart melt: "Beings of nuts and bolds would feel the pangs of love in their aluminum hearts." The Kuchars sure are good with costumes. I really like the number that a character named Gianbela wore--a woman's bejeweled hat (he's a man, by the way), leather gloves, my grandmother's vest, a flower coming out the side of his head like he's a Dr. Seuss character. There's also a character (an astronaut, I believe) who is wearing a football uniform (an astronaut suit, I believe). There's a great scene with a fruit dump dance and a naked Fleshapoid with Adam and Eve-style giant leaves and paper flowers covering the naughty bits. But my favorite scenes involve Xar (played by the late Bob Cowan who also narrated), the Fleshapoid with helmet who makes these really jerky movements that made me wonder if he was supposed to be broken. I think it was just Cowan doing robot movements. If nothing else, Sins taught me about what paradise is--fruit and fish baskets, Clark bars, and guys eating ice cream without a shirt.

Wendel Samson's tale, after I watched the whole thing, was still a secret to me. The characters do talk in this one although it might be with the worst dubbing I've ever heard. It's like they added reverb for some reason. This has some of the worst dialogue ever, but the editing might be worse. You get a characters inviting each other to have coffee before an abrupt transition and a character saying "Boy, this coffee is great" before an abrupt transition to a scene where there's a guy without a shirt enjoying coffee in a bed. Kuchar's must like filming shirtless men enjoying desserts and beverages. But who doesn't? Speaking of abrupt, the soundtrack to all three of these films are very strange. There are dizzying changes from genre to genre. My favorite bit of music in this was this wildly trippy moog stuff with Superman television samples thrown in. And no, it didn't really match what was going on in the movie, a scene that led up to [Spoiler Alert!] a maddening scene with a firing squad and some cartoon laughter.

The Craven Sluck might be my favorite film title ever. I think I decided that the Kuchars were making a comedy, but I can't be sure. This one has a narrator (also Cowan) who introduces the cast over pictures of a pin-up. I like how he says marmoset. He even spells it for us and lets us it's just like the South American tree monkey. Sluck's got pooping dogs and people drinking out of toilets, and it ends with some bitchin' flying saucer effects that you would not have expected had I not spoiled the whole thing for you. My favorite scene: the main character (the Sluck? What's a sluck?) says, "It's been years since I've had someone I could talk intellitigently [sic] to" with the next shot being her on her hands and knees bouncing up and down and displaying some rather oppressively trembling udders.

Daisies

1966 Czech feminist film

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Two girls (Marie I and Marie II) decide that the world is bad. As a result, they decide to be bad, finding various ways to misbehave by conning perverse butterfly collectors, playing with the food, playing with their food more, breaking stuff, drowning, and being general nuisances. Honestly, you're going to be frustrated if you like movies that have plots and characters who aren't named the exact same thing.

Yet another Eastern European movie, Czech even. At times, you could accuse this of looking like a film school project that the professor didn't even like very much. It's an artsy-fartsy dadaistic clash of visual trickery and tomfoolery. You've got rapid and maddening color changes, weird sound effects (like creaking door sounds when the gals move their limbs or typewriter noises when there's nary a typewriter), lots of scenes involving the slicing and dicing of phallic symbols, the best scissor fight you're likely to see, and lots of scenes that seem to go on forever. But it does all add up to something, again with sort of an obvious film schoolish theme, and it is visually arresting and completely interesting considering the time and place it was made. It didn't last long, by the way. Czechoslovakia banned, so nobody would get to see the fantastic scene where the Maries take after Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel (a movie that should have been banned in Czechoslovakia and everywhere else; and I'm not even pro-censorship!) and mimic trains while in blackface. There's some Svankmajer-esque animation with the quicky-shots of things like locks, butterflies, word shavings, and colors. This is not exactly a movie that stands the test of time, and the stream-of-conscious delivery and too-lengthy scenes will annoy most people, but I'm nevertheless happy I watched it.

The Draughtsman's Contract

1982 Peter Greenaway movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Mr. Neville, the titular Draughtsman, is hired by the wife of a rich guy to draw twelve sketches of his property while her husband is away. The price? Twelve sexual favors, the going rate in 17th Century England. As he sketches, he begins to unravel some secrets about the family, secrets that gradually start to involve him.

I've probably pointed this out before, but I'm not really smart enough to be watching Peter Greenaway movies. I just pretended to like The Falls because it was the first year of this blog's existence, and I wanted all the readers I was going to have to be impressed with my intellect. Other Greenaway movies fly so far over my feeble head that I can't enjoy them at all. And sometimes, they just have too much of Ewan McGregor's penis. This one fogged up the brain, but I enjoyed its characters, their period dialogue as ornamental and frilly as their garden and wardrobes, and the way Greenaway frames his scenes. This is Greenaway's first narrative film, and he came out with his ideas guns blazing. I've criticized him for having way too many ideas, being so intellectually gloopy that there's no way the average person can connect to his movies, but there's something comforting in knowing that the artsy-fartsiness hasn't been something that developed over time but that existed right from the get-go. This puzzling little movie reminded me a lot of Last Year at Marienbad, a riddle that was a favorite from a couple years ago. Like that movie, there's nothing happening that is all that bizarre (most of the movie is a guy drawing sketches with Peter Greenaway's hand) but their interactions just don't seem right. Of course, this movie does have a statue that walks around or sometimes urinates. You can add "Peeing Statue Man" to my list of Favorite Characters Who Don't Get Any Lines. Michael Nyman provides the score. It's a gorgeous and strange film that might give you the most enjoyable headache you'll ever have. Surprisingly, there's not much nudity at all, so you perverts looking for that sort of thing should find something else to watch. Actually, almost all of you should find something else to watch.

Gooby

2009 children's horror film/possible sequel to The Shining

Rating: 5/20 (Emma: 2/20; Abbey: 1/20)

Plot: Poor little Willy's got no friends, his parents don't really pay attention to him, and to make his life even more miserable, his family is moving to a new place. And he's seeing monsters. Luckily, his childhood stuffed toy comes to life and septuples in size to hang out with him.

Biggest laugh I've had in a while: When looking up information for this movie, I saw it described on several websites as being about a boy and the bear from The Shining. And Gooby does like like the man in a bear suit in my favorite scene in The Shining which might make this the greatest movie of all time. Then again, it might represent the main problem with Gooby as a children's movie--that it's terrifying. Unless you happen to think that the main problem is that the name of the movie is Gooby. It's one of those titles I can't imagine people wanting to ask about for at a ticket window. "Two tickets to, umm, Gooby please?" I thought for sure there'd be a twist ending where it's revealed that Willy is schizophrenic. I assumed this was like an after-school special about mental illness. It's really the only way this could have made any sense at all. I figured the whole time that he would be the only person to ever see Gooby, but it didn't turn out to be that way at all. Toward the beginning of the story, he does see a CGI monster thing, the reason Gooby shows up in the first place, I think. But the man-in-a-suit Gooby and th CGI monster never interact, so I'm not real sure why that CGI monster was in this thing at all. Maybe they intended to have Gooby do battle with the CGI monster but realized that a CGI monster and a guy in a suit would look ridiculous. I couldn't believe it when I saw that this movie came out in 2009, probably because it's got the sentimentality of an 80's kiddie flick and everything it rips off comes from that era. The story's dopey, the dialogue is embarrassingly awful, and the way this plot develops would make even the men with the most cinematic intestinal fortitude lose their cookies. Gooby, by the way, eats a lot of cookies in this, sort of like E.T. with the Reese's Pieces minus the distasteful product placement. That would put Gooby a notch above E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, but at least there's not a scene in the latter where E.T. farts and then starts fanning his crotch to waft the smell in Elliot's direction. Gooby does that because that's the type of friend Gooby is. And that's the type of movie Gooby is.

And for your amusement, here's a picture of the bear from The Shining (best scene in that movie, by the way) and a picture of Gooby from Gooby (there is no best scene in that movie, by the way):

The Lickerish Quartet

1970 sex comedy

Rating: 11/20

Plot: In their big fancy castle, a middle-aged married couple watch a pornographic movie with their twenty-something son. The son objects; the father cracks jokes. Eventually, they decide to get out and walk to a carnival where they enjoy the stunt driving of a trio of motorcyclists. When the female driver removes her helmet, they recognize her as one of the actresses in the movie they were watching. At least they think it's her. Naturally, they take her back to the castle, have some really awkward conversations, and then show her the pornographic movie. The next morning [Spoiler Alert!], they all have sex with her. Individually, of course, because together would just be disturbing.

Came across this title in a "Cult Movies" book, and I can't say I'm really glad I did. It drools like the 1970s, weirdly alternating between jerk-off material smuttage to pretentious dick-with-the-audience arthouse flick. It's an Italian movie, and it has the feel of one even though the dialogue's in English. The acting is stilted, forced and awkward, and the writing doesn't help the actors out much. Observe:

Girl: Who has the gun?
Father: What gun?
Girl: To do the shooting?
Father: There isn't going to be any shooting.
Girl: Of course there is.
Father: Of course there isn't!

Actually, with dialogue like that, it's hard to imagine that this isn't a comedy. An artsy erotic comedy! I actually did laugh quite a bit if you stretch your definition of "laugh" to include scrunching up one's face and saying, "What the hell?" I really liked the father's butterfly joke and its subsequent no-reaction. And I agree with the father that watching erotic movies in reverse and at a higher speed is worthy of a hearty guffaw. And how can you really hate a movie with a magic show, a motorcycle stunt scene, a spirited game of hide and seek, and a shot of a python swallowing a baby pig? You can't. I won't complain about the nudity either. Star Silvana Venturelli's easy on the eyes. The taste I can't wash out of my eyes, however, is the visual of the father and the visitor rolling most unerotically on a library floor that happens to have the definitions of sexual terms all over it. That was following the foreplay which consisted of the couple throwing books at each other and the father resenting his son. Yeah, it's that kind of movie. Awesome song during that scene though, all layered psychedelic guitar noodling. There's some neat elements here, but the pretentious camera play, random shots of feet and people falling down the stairs, World War flashbacks, and the overuse of visual motifs just scream artsy-fartsy. It was like director Radley Metzger decided he better make The Lickerish Quartet artistic or risk offending his mother and, after realizing he had no story whatsoever, decided to just befuddle the audience by blending present and past, reality and fantasy, motorcycles and shadow puppets. "See, Mom? It's not pornographic. It's Art!" Unfortunately, the pseudo-intellectual erotic mess it adds up to is no more intelligent than the erotic mess I made while watching it.

How about that tagline, by the way? "Beyond the physical edge. . ."

The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave

2000 straight-to-video comedy

Rating: 5/20

Plot: The titular stuntman decides to call it a career after he survives yet another failed stunt. He retires to his compound with his posse where he trains the future stuntmen of America including young D.J. who he takes under his wing and treats like a son. In fact, D.J. takes the name Super Dave Jr. before double-crossing his "father" with a shady promoter named Gil Ruston. Retirement isn't going well until Super Dave falls for the equally clumsy Sandy. But when her son Timmy aggravates his heart condition while trying to attempt his own stunt, Super Dave finds that he has no other hope of raising money for his operation than to come out of retirement for one more potentially deadly stunt.

This has about as much sophistication as the work of Jim Varney as Ernest P. Worrell. About the same amount of laughs, too. I gave this a shot because I like Bob Einstein's work on Curb Your Enthusiasm as Marty Funkhouser, and mockumentary veteran Don Lake is also in this. But had I known a bit two minutes into the movie featuring Ray Charles driving a bus was the funniest thing in the entire movie, I probably would have stopped watching. At about 90 minutes, this is a test of endurance, especially since about 40 of those minutes are made up of one seemingly endless series of fart jokes that made me embarrassed for everybody involved in the production of The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave. Predictably plotted, mind-numbingly idiotic, and devoid of any entertainment value whatsoever, it's not difficult to figure out why this movie was never released in theaters. Recommended for Bob Einstein completists only.

Inception

2010 cerebral action movie

Rating: 15/20 (Jen: 13/20)

Plot: Loosely based on Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, this involves Leonardo Dicaprio busting into people's dreams to steal their ideas. It's a confusing job, but somebody's got to do it. The work's cost him. His wife's dead, and for various reasons, he can't return to the United States and be with his children. An Asian guy offers him a job, but instead of the extraction he's used to performing, he's given the task of planting an idea in a guy's brain. That's called inception. He gathers together a team and meticulously plans this reverse heist. It won't be easy, and there will be a lot of explosions.

While watching this movie, I fell asleep and had my own tri-level dream. I don't remember my dream details often, but I know this one had something to do with trying to warn a dog that my friend Don's hot older sister who liked The Doors had put dynamite under his bowl. Then Lionel Richie broke into my dream and sang that "I had a dream; I had an awesome dream" song, but I couldn't pay attention to lyrics because his pants were too bright. Suddenly, I'm shooting at gypsies. Blam blam blam blam! Explosion! It was a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within Christopher Nolan's jism. And Shooby Leboof (he's in all of my dreams) taps me on the shoulder and says that we've only got thirteen third level dream days remaining before we'll have to clean up dog guts from the first level dream. I had enough of that sort of thing on my honeymoon, so Shooby and I walk arm in arm so that we can push my cousin off a ladder so that he can pop balloons in close proximity to our faces. When I woke up, Roger Ebert was standing by my bed (this is not unusual lately) calling me a genius. And he knew the lyrics to that Lionel Richie song, but he couldn't sing them.

The general idea behind this movie is pretty cool, and the special effects are dazzling. But all that razzle-dazzle is really just hiding the fact that this is a big, dumb action movie covered in layers and layers of intellectual mumbo-jumbo. It's a simple story packed in multicolored packing peanuts, surrounded by shimmering baubles, and scrambled by the world's most expensive spatula. It's not nearly as masturbatory as the worst parts of the Matrix movies, but it has more than a little bit in common with them. After the intriguing premise and the rules of the movie unfold with Dicarprio explaining things to that girl from Juno, you get a solid hour and fifteen minutes or so of car chases, shoot 'em ups, and those aforementioned 'splosions. I didn't just have a headache because I already developed a headache from trying to think too much. It was a double headache, a headache that folded over on top of itself like the city in that dream. Boredom set in. I give credit to Nolan for coming up with a very original idea and for allowing the story to unfold in an interesting way. The performances are fine, maybe better than you'd expect from a movie with more special effects than non-special ones. It's really a pretty good movie, but it could have been a whole lot shorter. I had heard that the ending is ambiguous, but it seemed self explanatory to me. I think the fact that I don't really care to think about it all that much shows my true feelings about Inception.

Forbidden Zone

1982 musical

Rating: 24/20 (Anonymous: 16/20) [Rating Note: I told Anonymous after watching this that I was going to rate it eight points higher than he did. Hence, the 24/20.]

Plot: The Hercules family lives just a large intestine above the Sixth Dimension, a mysteriously goofy land ruled by King Fausto, a little fellow, and his wife Queen Doris. Inevitably, one of the family members, in this case Frenchy, finds her way into the Sixth Dimension and has to be rescued by her family and friends.

"Hot damn! The Sixth Dimension!"

Ever want to hear the little guy from Fantasy Island say, "I love to feel your nipples harden when I caress them with my fingertips"? Yes? Well, this is your movie then, mo-fo! And that's not all. With Forbidden Zone, you get a guy in a gorilla suit, an evil half-man/half-frog creature, Danny Elfman playing the devil, lots of topless women, an old guy in boxers (boxers always threatening to unflap and give a little too much information, if you know what I mean) who humps everything he encounters, a human chandelier, racial stereotyping (the first character you see is in black face), bald beatboxers in jock-straps, askew jazz numbers, and Herve Villechaize. It's hard to believe that a film this weird can sustain momentum. A lot of weirdo flicks run out of gas and get stale, but not Forbidden Zone. This starts weird, gets weirder, continues to hit you with left turn after left turn, calls you a jackass right to your face, and then ends weird. And the whole time, blood's just rushing to your balls, and you're slapping the couch with your palm or accidentally (and unknowingly) fondling your own brother. This makes Rocky Horror seem like white bread by comparison. This is what Pee Wee Herman dreams about when not molesting himself inside an extra large container of buttered popcorn. This is David Lynch, John Waters, Tim Burton, and Terry Gillium deciding to travel back in time to the 1930s to make cartoons together after having a surgery performed in which they're attached at the lobes but then killing each other in a dispute over whether or not the frog should have a sex scene and the film being completed in their absence by the second coming of Christ. This is the type of music that people form religions after watching. The music is pretty incredible--an eclectic mishmash that is part-Residents, part-jazz, part-cabaret, part-cartoon-sound-effects. The entire movie is director Richard Elfman (Danny's brother) trying to create The Mystic Knights of Oingo Boingo's stage show on the big screen. I didn't expect much, not being a fan of Oingo Boingo, but color me impressed. Fans of Danny Elfman's soundtrack work should seek this out as it's a lot of fun to see where he started. Any filmmaker watching this in '82 (Tim Burton maybe) would have no doubt been impressed with Elfman's potential, and it was fun for me to hear traces of Nightmare in a few of the songs. I was also impressed with the mix of animation and live action which, along with the black and white and the woman who played Frenchy's stage design, makes this unlike anything I've seen. This low-budget affair is far from cinematic perfection, but it's such an obvious labor of love, such an explosion of creativity, and such an oddball visual feast, that it's easy to forget the imperfections.

Forbidden Zone admittedly isn't for everybody. But I'm not going to like people who don't like it. Hot damn!

The Man Who Fell to Earth

1970 artsy-fartsy science fiction

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Alien David Bowie comes to earth in search of water. Apparently he's thirsty. He's able to use his planet's advances in technology and inventions to start a billion-dollar corporation with the help of an attorney and a science professor. He's then able to fund a space exploration project. Unfortunately, his girlfriend and America get in his way.

Frustrating. I love a lot of the imagery, especially the noisy contrast between David Bowie's orange hair and the New Mexico landscape. See also: the contrast between Bowie's quiet home planet and loudly modern Americana. I think Bowie et. al. do a fine job, and there are some really cool moments--Bowie watching multiple televisions, a very strange sex scene, another very strange sex scene some disorienting editing. I also like the cross-pollination of genres. This is part-fable, part-Western, part-sci-fi, and part-love story. It's also part-flatulence. There's just so much clutter. This is a movie that needs to clean out the garage and yard sale the forty-five minutes that just doesn't need to be there. I like some of what this movie has to say (specifically about American materialism and violence) but it says it too pretentiously and not really very clearly. There's definitely a lot to like with The Man Who Fell to Earth, but you really have to be willing to like it for a lot longer than most people will want to. The ending's also a bit of a let-down.

Russian Ark

2002 trip through a museum

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A guy stumbles awake at the Winter Palace of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. I think he's a ghost. Anyway, nobody seems to be able to see him, but he encounters a Frenchman in black who can and they wander about meeting historical figures and looking at pretty pictures.

Favorite scene: The Frenchman leaves a room. The door closes behind him, and he just stands there for a moment. The door opens slightly, and a guy's head and shoulders peek out. He blows a raspberry at the Frenchman who immediately blows one back. Then, the guy's head and shoulders go back into the room, and the door closes.

This movie is boring. Maybe even really boring. Part of the trouble was probably that I don't know anything at all about Russian history. I recognized some names (i.e. Catherine the Great), but those names might as well have been anything (Danny Doppleheimer, Lance Bickenstaff, Corrina Peabody, etc.)because they didn't mean anything to me. Despite the movie's relatively short running time (just a bit over 90 minutes), I had to watch this in two installments. My son couldn't make it through fifteen minutes. Having said that, this is a remarkable achievement, and the more I think about the amount of work that had to have gone into this production, the more I'm impressed. The film's famous for being the first film that is an uninterrupted single shot, the camera flowing through a myriad of rooms occupied by seemingly thousands of actors and actresses. The effect is dreamy, hypnotic, and exceptionally beautiful. There's artwork--naked people statues, paintings--and the architecture of this palace is artistic itself. Most of the time, the screen is stuffed with beauty, and I found my eyes wandering from corner to corner of my too-tiny television to take it all in. Technically, it's just an amazing long take. If one of these thousands of people screws up, everybody has to get back in their places and the whole shoot starts over again. And even though this movie was shot in 96 minutes or so, it actually involved four years in preparation, practice, and positioning. When I think about how much work had to go into things like lighting, I'm just amazed. Truly an ambitious and extraordinary feat. The guy who plays the Frenchman, Sergei Dontsov, is especially good, and I loved how the camera would drift over a wall or a painting or thousands of dancing people and then settle on the guy just standing there waiting. Russian Ark is also interesting because you get a first-person point of view. You borrow the anonymous narrator's eyes for 90 minutes which puts you right in this museum. And you don't even have to pay to get in! I wonder if there are any other first-person movies like this. Is anybody even reading this far? This is too dull, too haunting, too historically dense, and too Russian to appeal to most folk, but there's really something fascinating about the whole thing. It absorbs you.

I looked it up, by the way. The finished film was actually the fourth take. The first three had to be stopped because of technical difficulties.

Elf

2003 Christmas comedy

Rating: 10/20 (Dylan: 6/20; Emma 2/20; Random Guy Sitting Next to Me on the Plane: 14/20)

Plot: Orphan Buddy, intrigued by Santa's sack, crawls in while the jolly old elf is busying himself under the orphanage Christmas tree and is dashed away to the North Pole. He's adopted by Papa Elf and tries his best to make toys and perform other elf tasks, but it becomes obvious to him, because of his size and lack of elf skills, that he isn't an elf. He decides to travel to New York City and find his real father.

As a displaced-person-trying-comically-to-adapt-to-his-new-surroundings comedy (i.e. Crocodile Dundee, the television series Perfect Strangers, and seemingly anything with Pauly Shore in it), this is an original and humorous idea, and I suppose Will Ferrell is the perfect man to fit those tights. Unfortunately, not much of the actual writing is original. This is as predictable as it gets. I understand that it really has to be--it's a Christmas story and it's got to have a happy ending where the elf man gets the girl, the grouchy guy becomes a better father, and Christmas is saved--but it really makes everything way too light and fluffy. Like all Will Ferrell movies, a handful of the material works and brings, at the very least, a grin while the majority of the jokes and slapstick moments and quotables make you wonder not only why you continue watching the movie but why you even should go on living. The second half of the movie is especially cringe-worthy. You frolic along with Buddy through an exposition, and then it feels like somebody, probably James Caan, has kidnapped you, put you in a sleigh, and crashed through a candy cane forest to hurry toward an action-packed climax. Dizzying! You watch because you want to checkmark your list of predictions and because you're on an airplane and have nothing better to do. At least this wasn't as bad as the worst movie I've seen on an airplane--The Polar Express--which I still suspect was part of some ingenious terrorist attack. The one question I'm left with after watching Elf: Was Bob Newhart embarrassed after his participation in this movie?

Waiting for Hockney

2008 documentary

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Delusional pencil artist/waiter Billy Pappas works for eight and a half years in his studio (located conveniently in his parents' home) on an insanely detailed sketch of Marilyn Monroe. He has high hopes that he's about to rock the art world and wants artist David Hockney to validate his hard work. Unfortunately, he's got an encouraging entourage.


First off, the picture itself, once the filmmaker finally decides to reveal it, is pretty incredible. I'm not sure about the decision to wait so long for that unveiling. There's so much of a build-up that pretty much anything is going to be underwhelming, but it's still a pretty magical moment once it's unveiled. The eventual meeting with David Hockney, also built-up and highly anticipated, is only shown in photographs and discussed by the eye witnesses. It sort of takes away some of story's spunk. Still, this can be stacked up with a couple fistfuls of other documentaries and fictions about artists and their art and the philosophical questions about what art even is.

Last Year at Marienbad

1961 dream

Rating: 18/20

Plot: At a sprawling luxurious hotel, a man attempts to convince a woman that she needs to run off with him because they met and had an affair last year or some other time at the same place or maybe a different place.

First off, this is one of the most beautiful and most beautifully mysterious movies I've ever seen. Second off, it's definitely not for all tastes. For most, it might be frustratingly disconnected, exhaustingly redundant, and teasingly inconclusive. For me, this movie, with its gentle and repetitive narration, liturgical organ soundtrack, deliberate pacing, and and fragile textures is a hypnotic riddle from beginning to end and unlike anything else I've seen before. It was like falling asleep and waking up in Andre Breton's duffel bag or a haunted house of mirrors. Enigmatic and surreal, Last Year at Marienbad demands multiple viewings, but I'm almost positive that multiple viewings would do very little to help me unravel this bad boy. Ghost story? Sci-fi time travel nonsense? Esoteric romantic comedy? Murder mystery? It's gorgeous enough to be seen by everybody (shot by Peter Greenaway's cinematographer Sacha Vierny) and incomprehensible and pretentious enough to be loved by all!

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One

1968 meta shit

Rating: 15/20

Plot: William Greaves directs an inane conversation in Central Park. Meanwhile, his crew is filmed filming the inane conversation. A few times, the crew is shown sitting around discussing Greaves' ineptitude.

I won't pretend I know exactly what's going on here. Like Greaves' film crew, I'm a little more than perplexed by the shiznit taking place in the park, but it's a completely captivating look at the creative process and entertaining. It's very nearly a product of its time (scratching the surface of race relations, feminist issues, and being a fag in 1960's America) but retains relevance because of the questions it brings up about the process of creating a movie and watchability because of its playfulness. Miles Davis adds a fusiony soundtrack. I especially liked the philosophical homeless guy interviewed near the end of the movie. In a way, I wish there would have been more regular inhabitants of Central Park interviewed or shown wandering through the shoot, but perhaps Greaves was saving that for the four sequels that were supposed to come out following the success of this first installment. This is a challenging chunk of filmed anarchy that might serve as an interesting companion piece to Man with a Movie Camera.