Even Dwarfs Started Small

1970 movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Inmates at some sort of institution run amok.

This was actually the first I knew of Werner Herzog because I was on a crazy quest to get my hands on bizarre movies as well as movies that had little people. I was instantly a fan. What choice did I have? It's a cast of little people! I'm not actually sure what the point of that is. Honestly, I'm not completely sure what the point of the entire movie is. I don't think Herzog's focus is broad, and I don't think he's filming anything satirical. Instead, I think this has more to do with individual psyche, a kind of duel between the part of a person that wants to go by the book and follow the rules and be normal and the part of the person that wants to raise hell and burst seams and piss fire. Herzog films this almost like it's a documentary. There are several times when the performers--all, I believe, non-professionals--will look at the camera and presumably at Herzog, sometimes like they believe they might be in danger. It gives this an odd kind of realism. At times, they do look like they're in danger, especially Gerhard Maerz who plays a character named Territory. I believe that's the little guy who was run over by a car at one point during the filming and caught fire in another scene. He's the real stuntman of the group--climbing out of a moving vehicle to the top, etc. Herzog put these little actors and actresses through some stressful situations, so stressful that he promised he would jump into a bunch of cacti following the filming. None of these actors went on to have film careers. In fact, almost all of them have only this movie in their filmography. Pepi Hermine played "The President" in this and also played the president in Downey's Putney Swope. Helmut Doring was also in Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and he's awesome in this, spending almost the entire movie laughing demonically. It's the kind of laugh that you'll hear long after the movie has ended, maybe in your dreams and maybe in somebody else's dreams. You really can't take your eyes off this guy. Doring is the tiniest of the bunch, and there's one scene where he spends about five minutes trying to get onto a bed. Of course, that's not the most interesting thing these characters do. They have a forced marriage ceremony, peruse dirty magazines, interrupt a blind duo's game, disrupt piglets' dinner, conduct an insect wedding, make a car drive in endless circles, destroy typewriters and rugs, start cockfights, have pointing contests with trees, and crucify a monkey. Other than that crucified monkey, there are other shocking and bleak moments involving animals. There's a one-legged chicken that Herzog's camera watches for a long time, a scene where some chickens play with a dead mouse, and a really disturbing scene with piglets suckling a dead mother. And the movie starts with a slow circular pan of the premises and then a shot of a chicken pecking at a dead friend. Herzog's always got great endings, and this one doesn't disappoint. In fact, it's one of my favorite movie endings ever--Helmut Doring laughing while watching a defecating camel. It's a shot which goes on way too long which, in my opinion, is just the right amount of time.

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.

Pink Flamingos

1972 high art

Rating: I don't want to give this a rating.

Plot: Divine and her son Crackers live in a pink mobile home with Mama Edie and enjoy their notoriety as the filthiest people alive. That title is challenged, however, by the Marbles, a couple who kidnap women and sell babies to lesbians. Filth vs. filth action ensues.

For a movie I don't really enjoy, I sure have seen this enough times. I find it impossible to rate. It's a terrible movie and very much the "septic tank explosion" that the person compares it to on the poster there. It's revolting for the sake of revulsion with its dumptruck load of talking anuses, fecal matter, sex acts involving (and killing, reportedly) chickens, magic marker hair dye jobs, bad narration (Waters himself), egg men (Paul Swift who was in three other Waters' movies), drug references, arson, curse words, syringe violation, and transexuals. But something that succeeds in shocking and sickening this much almost deserves respect, right? Waters is either a very sick individual or a guy who had a perverse vision and with almost no budget succeeded in bringing that vision to life on drive-in screens. And if you dare look hard enough, there's a message beneath all this madness, and disturbingly prescient message at that. In a way, this foreshadows the extremes people will go to in order to have their Warholian fifteen minutes of fame and predating reality shows by about twenty-five years. Of course, reality shows don't go to these extremes. Nobody eats dog crap on reality shows. Or did they do that on Fear Factor? With its anti-style, in-your-face ineptitude, and belligerent distastefulness, this is unlikely to be a movie that very many people can sit down and enjoy. Still, it's a unique statement and an unforgettable piece of work.

Bridesmaids

2011 comedy

Rating: 14/20 (Jen: 16/20)

Plot: Annie's BFF Lillian is getting hitched, and Annie, of course, is asked to be the maid-of-honor. Her life stinks in numerous ways, but she's happy for her friend. A rivalry develops with a new friend of Lillian's who seems to want to take over BFF duties.

My brother recommended this one which surprised me a little bit because he does not like to laugh. Though it's not on the surface much different than the majority of the modern comedies we have dumped on us, especially the ones with the name Apatow attached to them (he produced this), I found this one more consistently funny and easier to like. There are moments when everybody involved seems to be trying a little too hard and the dependence on gross-out gags, something that irritates me if I'm not in the right sort of mood, was there. But the almost-improvisational feel this has gives the characters and their relationships a very natural rhythm. I don't know anything about Kristen Wiig other than she has too man i's in her last name. I don't know her SNL work and don't remember her in the movies I've seen in which she's had smaller parts. Here, I was impressed, and not just because I thought she was kind of cute. She's got this ability to be absolutely adorable and ugly at the same time, and her ability to pull off this character who is likable and unlikable at the same time really makes this movie work. I don't care much for Minnie Ripperton's kid, another former (?) SNL alumnus, though. It's Melissa McCarthy, the Molly in some show I've never seen called Mike and Molly, who really steals the show though. At first, I was thinking, "This character is hilarious, but she's either not going to be in this movie very much or they're going to kill it by having her in way too many scenes." She ended up being in the movie a lot, and "a lot" was the perfect amount of screen time for her. She was physically very funny, and the outrageous and often absurd bits of dialogue make me wonder how the other actresses got through the scenes without laughing at her. I also liked Chris O'Dowd's character, but I'm pretty sure I was supposed to. O'Dowd, by the way, could probably end up in every romantic comedy. In the end, this isn't a terribly deep or even very original movie, but it did succeed in making me a little happier than I was before I started watching it. That's something.

Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie

2012 comedy

Rating: 10/20

Plot: The titular guys waste the titular billion dollars they got to make the titular movie and try to run a run-down shopping mall in order to make money to pay off their debt.

Those of you who aren't entertained by references to the "penis hole," watching children defecate on a guy, watching one character urinate on another, or Jeff Goldblum need not apply. This goes far beyond your typical gross-out comedy into something more bizarre. This is based on a Cartoon Network's Adult Swim show that is just as bizarre but in much shorter installments. The punchy absurdity of that works for its principal audience--people who eat drugs. Here, the absurdities piled on absurdities is exhausting, and although there was enough to laugh at here (shamefully) to make it worth it, especially if you're in the mood for this sort of stupidity, it's probably too much for most people to handle. I'm not even sure fans of the show would be too excited about what comedians Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim have done here. Will Ferrell and Will Forte are both pretty funny in this. John C. Reilly? Not so much.

Screwball: The Ted Whitfield Story

2010 comedy

Rating: 6/20

Plot: During the 1994 baseball strike, professional wiffleball legend Ted Whitfield attempts to break the home run single single record of 122. Controversy surrounds him as cheating accusations arise.

This half-assed mockumentary, one that doesn't really follow its own rules and ends up being a half-mockumentary/half-straight-fiction, has a handful of interesting ideas mixed in with all the poop and penis jokes and cheap drug references. I thought having this coincide with the '94 strike and a lot of subtle references to McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds was kind of clever. The blue dinos, a performance-enhancing vitamin, and the diming the bat episode were almost funny. And it was fun hearing a pretty good Harry Caray impersonator. Unfortunately, this wears thin very quickly. It really should have been a nine-minute short on Youtube instead of a feature-length movie. Oh, well. At least I got to use my bestiality tag again. A movie about wiffleball does seem like a promising idea. And this one, though nowhere near a good movie, did inspire me to start up an adult wiffleball league once I recover from my foot injury surgery. Two-man teams, standard rules. So far, I've recruited one other guy, and I know my brother and brother-in-law will play. So I guess you could say that Screwball: The Ted Whitfield Story was an inspiration.

The Help

2011 movie

Rating: 11/20 (Jen: 15/20)

Plot: A woman who wants to be a writer but apparently has nothing at all to write about gets a housekeeping advice column gig at a small-town newspaper. She has a maid write the column for her. That gives her a brilliant idea--collect a bunch of maids, have them share their scatological stories, and then make that into a book. She waffles, thinking maybe it's a better idea to go with her original plan and just copy The Old Man and the Sea word-for-word and put her name on it, but eventually decides to have the maids do her work for her. Oh, I get it. They help her! The Help!

I don't imagine that I'm the audience for this movie. No, this movie is made for white women who have a whopping two hours and twenty minutes to spare, probably a white woman with a maid because white women without maids aren't going to have the time to watch the thing. This is the sort of bloated Hollywood thing made to win some awards and jerk some tears, and everything is just right about the thing. The actresses (The Help trivia: The total amount of time male characters appear on screen for this is a record low one minute and thirty-seven seconds.) act just like their supposed to, the 1960's segregated South looks just like it's supposed to, and the music sounds just like it's supposed to. And the movie takes no chances, fails to challenge, and has almost no depth, just like it's probably supposed to. You don't need substance when you're just there to provide light amusement for housewives, right? Just throw a few "raggedy asses" into the script and a poop joke that would also appeal to most fourth grade boys even though they wouldn't watch this movie on account of all the cooties. They also force-feed the audience a cutesy little catch phrase, something you can put on all the posters maybe (The Help trivia: If you cut out all times a character says "You is kind. You is smart. You is important.", the movie would actually only be forty-three minutes long.), but it just made me want to correct grammar. This is just the type of movie that people will say moved them because it was artificially constructed to do just that. I was just bored out of my mind for way too long and will likely remember nothing about this movie in a few months other than it had a lot of black people in it.

Jen let me know repeatedly that a lot of these scenes "ain't never was in no raggedy-ass book," and I think the dulcet tones of her voice kept me awake.

My Dog Tulip

2009 dog porn cartoon

Rating: 12/20

Plot: And old guy talks endlessly about his dog and his attempts to get said dog laid.

Lots and lots of animated dog sex here, so what's not to like? I expected to like this one, and I did kind of like the animation style. At times, it would appear unfinished, and the simple backgrounds and sketchy feel actually did enhance the story. And I suppose if I really dug deep, the tale of the lonely old man (voiced by Christopher Plummer who really seems to get a kick out of the amount of times he gets to say "bitch" throughout this thing) and his best friend (a bitch) is touching without being overly sentimental and clobbering you on the head with how touching it is. But it's just so boring, a ninety minute movie that felt like it was nine hours long. Plummer's narration is constant and grew tiresome pretty quickly, and I just couldn't find enough reason to care about every little minutia of the man/dog relationship. If you really really like dogs, there's all kinds of allusions to Tulip's genitals that will likely turn your crank (so to speak), but I don't think this is the type of thing that would interest anybody else. Well, I take that back. It might be interesting to people who really really like lonely old men. Bland.