Ashik Kerib

1988 Paradjanov movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A poor minstrel falls in love with a rich gal and then wanders all over the place having various misadventures, most of them colorful.

It's lucky for us that the U.S. and Soviet Union stockpiled nuclear weapons during the Cold War because if we had decided to attack each other with color, it would have been hopeless. This is my fourth and likely final Sergei Paradjanov joint (that's what he called them), and like the other three, this is an unusual but wonderful experience. This is very obviously filmed on a tight budget, but Paradjanov overcomes that with his creative spirit and visual eye. Admittedly, I was frustrated early. It either took this story about this minstrel a while to gain momentum or I just needed to be warmed up a bit. My suggestion would be to try to find a Paradjanov short to use as foreplay before letting one of his features seduce you. This not only looks great; it sounds fantastic, too, with a soundtrack rich in Georgian folk music, the only kind of auditory daffiness that could fit a lot of this imagery. Observe: lots and lots of camels and guys with unibrows, beard thievery, a guy with fuzzy dice hanging from his crotch, birds and more birds, evil spirits arriving on ponies. Visual bliss if you ignore some of the most stilted acting you'll ever see and a story that didn't make a lot of sense. That acting. Yeesh. It was like a church group performance with even less of a budget. This movie might have the cheapest special effect I've ever seen, by the way--horse flight simulated with a close-up of a spinning globe. Oh, with a couple of dudes blowing shells in the only way shells can be blown into--gaily. My favorite scene features a guy sharpening knives while a guy spins a colorful umbrella behind him and to his right. It's a beautiful shot anyway, but then the camera pulls back and you have all these women undulating on the ground in the foreground pretending to be snakes. I think it's symbolic. Which reminds me--for a movie that is supposed to be a children's movie (I read), this is sure heavy on the symbolism. I don't think children can think this abstractly. And there's also a sex scene where some clowns toss a curtain over a man and a woman before the shell blowers do their shell-blowing thing and a guy starts throwing doves around. Yeah, that's exactly as spicy as it sounds. Ashik Kerib is more flawed than the other Paradjanov movies, more meandering and choppily incoherent, but if you're hip to the guy's cinematic voice, you'll be glad you popped this in. If I get married again, I'm having a Paradjanov-inspired wedding and reception, by the way.

Goodfellas

1990 gangsta movie

Rating: 19/20

Plot: Henry Hill rises up the gangster ranks and marries his sweetheart.

I don't think gangsters are very good influences. Just look at all the curse words in this movie! I do like the influence that I think this had on movies that followed it. Sure it's got some impersonators that pale in comparison, attempts at carbon copies that lack the distinctive voice that Goodfellas has. But for the most part, I think this did more good than harm in Hollywood. Minor quibble though: Shouldn't it be Good Fellows? This movie is electric from start to finish--from the in medias res buffoonery dealing with the contents of car's trunk to a conclusion where Henry's selfishness is more depressing to me than surprising. Electric. Most electric is Joe Pesci's off-kilter performance. That guy's best when he's completely losing control, and he gets plenty of chances to show off here and help create these iconic moments that become those movie moments that everybody remembers. Everybody else--and I mean everybody else--is also great. DeNiro's performance is as flawless in this as in those Fockers movies, but it's that kind of performance where he doesn't even look like he's doing anything special, deceptively so. The other guy on the cover, wide-eyed Liotta with his aw-shucks face makes a likable enough protagonist but he really works more like a straight man to a lot of wackily-inflated caricatures. And then there's the periphery characters, each adding a little shading or color to this consistently entertaining look at the [under]world of gangsters. I never realized how funny gangsters were. Technically, Scorsese's a master. The guy knows how to tell a story visually without getting in the way of things, but there are some standout scenes where his camera maneuvers in ways that shouldn't be logistically possible, like during Henry's first date when the camera follows them from their car to the table or a scene from Henry's point of view where he walks through a restaurant and we're introduced to all these colorful figures, including the guy who says everything twice. I also really like how this is all humanized a bit, or maybe softened, by focusing a little on the female characters including Pesci's mother (the one with an awesome painting that I'd love to hang in my house) and Mrs. Hill. The duo-narrators really give this story another dimension about 1/3 of the way into the film. This is one of those movies that seems about half as long as it actually is.

Note: "Beyond the Sea" is in this. For those of you who care about the numbers, that's the 27th movie I've watched this year with that song in it somewhere. This movie has a big soundtrack, by the way.

Another note: When I am beaten to death by a guy with crazy eyes, I don't want it to happen a while a Donovan song plays in the background, especially a wussy lame one like "Atlantis". Well, wait a second. That song does kind of rule. I'd prefer being beaten to death during a playing of "Atlantis" than "Mellow Yellow," I guess.

If I got to pick a song to be beaten to death to, I think I'd go with Sammy Davis Jr.'s version of "MacArthur Park" or something by Sonny Terry. How about you?

Bound for Glory

1976 biopic

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Woody Guthrie has to ride the rails after violently disrupting Uma Thurman's wedding. Along the way, he becomes a folksinging sensation and a voice for the common working man. But will his past come back to haunt him as Uma is hot on his dusty trail in her efforts to get her revenge and. . . Kill Woody!

So here's David Carradine as Woody Guthrie. He's really solid, especially when he's got a guitar, although I'm not sure I always buy him as a down-home kinda guy. I'm not sure if it was director Hal Ashby's intention or not, but Carradine stands out so much from the rest of the people on screen. And then at the same time, he doesn't quite stand out enough. Anyway, I like Carradine as the titular folky. Bound for Glory is a very good-looking movie, adequately filmed through a layer of dust for the scenes in the Dustbowl and a layer of grime for the train scenes. I like movies with lots of train action, and although there was a lot of time devoted to Woody's time hobo-ing it around, I really really likes those parts, probably because of my secret dream to someday be a hobo. Ashby and Carradine do a good job of illustrating Guthrie's importance to the folk without really getting into his importance on music in general, but that's likely because this is all based on Woody's autobiography. And because of that, you wonder how much of this you can really believe and how much of it is self-bloating. Ashby's version of Guthrie's story moves along languidly which gives somebody interested in this sort of material a chance to really absorb the setting and its characters, but I'd imagine this would get a little boring for a lot of viewers. Randy Quaid, by the way, plays a migrant worker. Why do I always assume that guy is much younger than he actually is. I just looked up his filmography and noticed that he was a Klansman in Birth of a Nation! A good look at the life and times of an American icon.

I'm Gonna Explode

2008 Mexican movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Roman makes a joke that only Maru laughs at, so they decide to run away from home. Well, sort of. They run to the roof and camp out, sneaking down when the adults are away to snag some food.

Like Roman and Maru for the bulk of this story, this movie goes nowhere. The kids are likable-enough misfits, and there are a few cute moments that are almost funny--the Harold-[and Maude] -esque talent show performance, the camp-out right above the parents' noses. But I'm Gonna Explode is too almosty. Like a reality show with shakier camera work, this goes through a lot of the minutia without really being interesting, revealing, funny, dramatic, or really anything else. Roman and Maru are almost eccentric enough to be interesting, but they barely stand out in their own story. This is Bonnie and Clyde without any character, stuttering story lines, and with a lot less misbehaving. Well, they do it at one point. I guess religious folks would say that's worse than robbing banks or killing people, right? I just wish this one had a destination instead of just meandering and plodding in that almost intriguing way. Maybe it needed to explode?

Funny Man

1994 horror-comedy

Rating: 6/20

Plot: Max beats Christopher Lee in a poker game and wins himself a mansion inhabited by a mischievous guy wearing a rubber mask and a ridiculous codpiece. The titular funny man begins harassing the new owner and his family and some random hitchhikers, including Velma and a black Yoko Ono, who show up.

First off, Christopher Lee's name might be on top of the poster, but he's in this movie for about five total minutes. So if you're going to check this out because you're some kind of weird Christopher Lee completist, be warned. The bulk of Christopher Lee's work is at the beginning during a poker game, my favorite part of the movie. Not only did it have a line that is one of my favorite things to say at the poker table ("Shit or get off the pot."), there was a bit of dialogue that I'm going to start saying in every single poker game I find myself in--"I've seen amputees with better hands than this." In my opinion, by the way, Max gets what he deserves in this movie because he slow-rolls Christopher Lee in the hand where he wins the house, and you just don't slow-roll Christopher Lee. The jester demon thing that inhabits the house is irritating. I did like his entrance--all loud percussive music ending in a thumbs-up of all things. That was pretty awesome. Funny Man isn't funny at all which makes the title not only misleading but an outright lie. He urinates on a van and plays soccer with a severed head, so sure he's the type of troll-faced demon jester you'd want to have at your parties, but he's more obnoxious than he is funny. And he repeatedly breaks the fourth wall which I'm sure the makers of Funny Man think is clever. The violent gags probably wouldn't please fans of the genre, although I did sort of enjoy seeing the character dressed as Scooby Doo's Velma get hers. The story seems pieced together, just gag stapled to gaggy gag, choppy and poorly paced.

Urine Couch AM Movie Club: Little Fockers

2010 comedy sequel

Rating: 5/20

Plot: Jack Byrnes' health is failing, and after his other son-in-law proves unworthy, he turns to whatever Ben Stiller's character's name is to become the family patriarch. Oh, and Ben Stiller's character has children now, the titular fockers. Ben Stiller's character does some things that are mistaken as other things, and Jack loses faith in his son-in-law before a bunch of things happen that are sort of similar to the other movies.

I had completely forgotten that I watched this about a month ago! I enjoyed watching it about half as much as I did the other two movies. Did anybody ask for Little Fockers? Did anybody--even the biggest fan of Meet the Parents, Meet the Fockers, Mother Fockers, Fockin' Crazy, or Fock This Garbage--love these characters so much that they just had to have another couple hours with them? Or is this just Hollywood trying to force-feed us crap? Here's a case of a movie where I like almost all the people involved but didn't like the movie at all. Ben Stiller? I like him. He's funny, and as I've written here previously, I wish I had hair like his. Owen Wilson? Like him. Dustin Hoffman, even an old Dustin Hoffman who's obviously just collecting checks at this point in his career? Like him. Barbra Streisand? I adore her! She's fabulous! Hoffman and Streisand's characters livened things up in the middle piece of this trilogy actually. DeNiro? Come on! It's DeNiro! Jessica Alba's underpants? I'm a big fan! They all try hard enough, but they've got a halfassed script and a predictable and flat story to work with. I'm not sure because I wasn't invited to co-write this thing, but I bet they finished a rough draft, had a few beers to celebrate, sat down a few weeks later for a rewrite, and decided that they didn't need to put any more effort into it because Owen Wilson was going to make it all funny no matter what and people would see the movie anyway. "We can just show Robert DeNiro looking all serious and Ben Stiller falling in a hole or something during the previews and people will line up!" Any comedy that has more bad child actors than laughs is in trouble. More bad child actors and about seventeen thousand more "God Focker" jokes. Seriously, DeNiro et. al. should be ashamed of themselves.

The Birds

1963 fowl movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: This slut buys some love birds and makes the trek to Bodega Bay to hand-deliver them the guy she currently wants to sleep with. Suddenly, seagulls and crows begin to attack humans for no good reason. Oh, snap!

"Are the birds gonna eat us, Mommy?"

Again, Hitchcock does a lot of subtle things with the camera here that enhance the experiences and set this a few notches above your standard birds-attacking-people-for-no-good-reason movies. The Bodega Bay setting is often framed so perfectly, and there are a lot of interesting visual perspectives you're not used to seeing. I'm not sure if Hitchcock was trying to show you things from a bird's eye view or not, but it kept things naturally uneasy. I also like the decision to use no music at all in the movie, just those exaggerated, almost comic bird sound effects. I saw this one as a kid (I think at my dad's house) and some scenes just never leave the mind--the creepy school children song chanted while crows gather on the monkey bars, the shot of the dead farmer with his pecked-out eyes, the seagulls floating into the overhead shot of a fire in the middle of town, that horrifying Tippi-in-the-phone-booth scene. Speaking of Tippi, I'll still contend that the scene where she's attacked in the attic is the most erotic five minutes ever filmed. I also love the scene where a bird puppet attacks Rod Taylor's arm, and the Night of the Living Dead-esque drama that unfolds as the characters hide inside their boarded-up house. Another great Tippi shot: the quick cuts between a moving line of fire and Hedron's slightly-changed expressions as her eyes follow the flame's movement. And who wouldn't enjoy watching so much footage of birds attacking children? Seriously, what's better than that? Speaking of that, I could understand an argument that the special effects in this are dated, but I really love them. They're dated in a good way! This movie also has a great stunt when a guy pumping gas gets hit in the head with a bird and falls down. The final shot--the car driving off with the lower half of the screen covered in bird and the upper half a gray sky with sun rays slicing across--is also really beautiful. There's an interesting subtext that takes this out of B-movie realms with poor Mitch and the women in his life--the old flame, the feisty aggressive new fling, the oppressive mother, and the little sister (what an age difference!). It'd be fun to look at the birds as symbols or examine this movie from a feminist perspective, but I'll save those kinds of thoughts for the next Disney cartoon I watch.

[Too Much Information Alert!]: The first time I pleasured myself, it was while watching that birds-attacking-Tippi scene. That wasn't at my dad's house. He showed me that when I was three, too young to masturbate. Speaking of toddlers, I tricked Sophie into watching this with me by telling her it was Rio. She didn't seem to enjoy it very much.

George Harrison: Living in the Material World

2011 biographical documentary

Rating: 16/20

Plot: An exhaustive look at the life, the work, and the spirituality of the best Beatle.

There's an honesty to this film that I really like. I know George Harrison didn't make this documentary about himself, but the accumulation of all this previously-unseen footage was his, so although the decision to not hide a lot of the scars just feels like his decision to me as much as it was his wife's or Scorsese's. And yeah, a lot of this does almost feel like a 3+ commercial for George Harrison, almost like a visual essay detailing all the reasons why George should be Saint George Version 2.0 or something. The one who wouldn't dare hurt a dragon. But instead of only painting a picture of Harrison as this mystical figure and focusing on how spiritual he was, it refuses to hide his shortcomings. Still, I would think it would be nearly impossible to watch this and not respect and like the guy, maybe the best example of a human being who is so perfectly flawed.

I thought this seemed a little scattered at the beginning, and I wasn't really sure where Scorsese was going with things. We had a description of George's Beatles "audition" on a double-decker bus, stuff about the break-up, and a little about his boyhead in the first ten minutes, and I wondered if this whole thing was going to be this frustratingly disjointed. It isn't though, just straightforward chronological stuff that thankfully ignores a lot of the stuff that's been covered or shown again and again in other Beatles documentaries. There are a lot of touching moments, especially the stuff at the end about his death and the relationship with his wife, and since George was the funniest Beatle, there are a lot of funny parts, too. My favorite moment might have been Ringo's joke: "How many Beatles does it take to change a lightbulb?" Pause. "Four!" Lots of Ravi Shankar. I love that guy and the other "giggly little Indian guy" too, and I really enjoyed Ravi's description of god and devil music. Also the applause after sitar tuning at Bangledesh. Oh, my other favorite moment was a story Tom Petty told about ukuleles. "He had a lot of ukuleles in his trunk."

I'm not sure there's anything all that revealing in this documentary, and it is really long. Beatles fans, and especially fans of the best Beatle, will like it just fine. I did learn that Phil Spector might be the ugliest lesbian that I'll ever see. See? Maybe if I had learned to be a better person by watching this documentary about a guy I'm convinced was a really good person, I'd have given this a 20.

By the way, there's this quick footage of a random guy wearing a bow tie and manically singing a song where he asks "Who wants to die?" I'd love to know who that is.

Urine Couch AM Movie Club: Old School

2004 comedy

Rating 8/20

Plot: A triad of grown men, all unhappy in different deep-down way decide to form a fraternity to recapture some of their glory (hole) days. Hilarious!

The Cardinals advanced to the World Series. I teared up a bit, wandered outside the hotel, and graded some papers. Following the award presentations, beer drenching, and celebrations, Old School came on, and Gene wanted to watch it. Again, forgot my promise. I don't think I'd ever be in the mood to watch this movie, but I was in a good enough mood to let Gene have his way although not sans trousers like he suggested. I had time before the movie I was really excited about watching came on, and First, I can't believe this came out in 2003. For whatever reason, it seems like it's been around forever like plagues, evil-doers, people making bad decisions, and AIDS have. No, this movie is not as awful as AIDS, but it's also probably not as funny. Luke Wilson's as likable as any Wilson brother or any Baldwin brother, but he needs funny material if he's going to be funny. Look at him in those Wes Anderson movies and then watch this. He's the same guy with the same amount of talent, but he just doesn't work here. And Jack Bauer is going to be pissed when he watches this and finds out what you did to his daughter, Luke. Will Ferrell never works, probably because of that stupid face. I don't like Vince Vaughn's face either and his work in this isn't as funny as what he did in that Psycho remake. In fact, I don't think I really like anybody in this movie except for Patrick Cranshaw. All 8 points I'm giving this movie are for Patrick Cranshaw actually. And just when you don't think the cast can get any more unlikable, the producers of Old School throw Snoop Dogg and Andy Dick at you. Andy Dick! I imagine the type of people who would care about the characters in this movie or let out a laugh or two would probably also be the same type of people who laugh at Andy Dick's name.

Cyrus

2010 comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: John, played by a guy named John, meets beautiful Molly, played by a woman named Marisa, at a party and they hit it off and later "do it," an act that I imagine would be absolutely amazing for at least one of them. John, recently divorced, finds Molly's home and meets her titular son, played by Barry's favorite actor. Cyrus is an older child but a needy man-child who still lives with and is attached to Mommy. Molly's new friend and her old son don't get along very well.

Boy, I thought I was hating this one, and ol' randy Ghost Gene and I were really only sticking with it with the hope that Marisa Tomei would be naked at some point since she usually is. John C. Reilly brought his Will Ferrell game to the opening of this, really hamming it up with some drunken antics at a party. By the time he urinates on a plant, I was disappointed that he was in another of those types of movies. You know, the types where characters urinate on plants for comic purposes. An early scene with Reilly pleasuring himself, a scene that ends with a nice shot of his posterior if you're into that sort of thing, didn't exactly set the right kind of tone either. But once Tomei, who isn't naked at all if you're into that sort of thing, enters the story, things get a lot better and Reilly actually gives a nice layered performance and never overcooks the comedy. Tomei is very good as this character on this balance beam. It's a delicate performance, and you connect with her and feel for her without her having to do much that seems too much like acting. You know who else isn't half bad here? Jonah Hill, who plays awkward almost like it's a diagnosable mental illness. He's also not naked, by the way, but there is a scene where you see more of his legs than you'd probably care to see. His Cyrus never really feels all that real to me, more a movie character in the vein of Macaulay Culkin's in The Bad Seed, but it works to create the right kind of awkwardness. I've written more than once on this blog about how modern comedies are more awkward than funny, but this one, like other independent understated comedies (Punch Drunk Love maybe), manages to work. I could have done with a better ending and a little more Catherine Keener. I also thought the score was oppressive.

Urine Couch AM Movie Club: Man on Fire

1987 movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A former CIA guy is hired as a bodyguard for a little girl for reasons that I must have missed. Anyway, he does a terrible job at it, and some thugs kidnap her while he gets an ouchie on his leg. When he recovers, he takes off to find her.

This original Man on Fire (I didn't see the original during my 134 movie "man" streak last summer either) is stuffy and spins its wheels. It spends a lot of time building up the relationship between the principals, and once it finally does, it throws a few action scenes at you before ending in a way that isn't all that satisfying. Despite the lengthy exposition, I never really bought their relationship, and it actually got a little creepy as it progressed. The creepiest moment is when the bodyguard guy quotes Of Mice and Men and then imitates the little girl's voice. It's really weird. And then you were jerked into a vague sort of action thriller. You do get to learn what happens when a white guy (Joe Pesci) sings Chuck Berry. Attempts to connect all this schmaltziness by connecting it to Steinbeck's Lenny and George seems halfassed. I'm not sure how I felt about the sort-of pretentious shots of a hanging lamp and swinging curtains that bookend this story. I was admittedly distracted during this Urine Couch AM Movie Club selection because Gene Siskel's ghost wouldn't stop asking, "Where's the black guy? Hey, Shane? Where's the black guy?"

Aladdin

1992 Disney cartoon

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A lengthy public service announcement in the French symbolist tradition about how teenagers should, instead of engaging in premarital sex, pleasure themselves. Aladdin grows tired of rubbing his lamp and getting his genie all over the place and decides to try to get in Jasmine's pants. After all, she seems willing with those little half shirt things and not even attempting to hide her pussycat. Eventually, Aladdin's "snake" gets loose and havoc is wreaked.

Seriously, Disney was so subconsciously dirty during this period (see Little Mermaid). Look at the symbols: soaring towers, water (female genitalia symbol according to most dream symbolism books), snakes, phallic genies with pubic beards, lamps being rubbed until they ejaculate, magic carpet rides (so that's what the kids are calling it these days?), a monkey transforming into an elephant (a boy's first erection?). Sick stuff, Mickey.

If you want a great animated feature with Aladdin in it, try The Adventures of Prince Achmed. If you want something a lot louder and a lot more colorful, go for Disney's Aladdin. This really is an entertaining Disney feature with a lot of fun visual gags and some really good songs. It rips off Superman's flight through the city with a magic carpet ride only Aladdin doesn't try to guess the color of Jasmine's underpants. (Or just pants as the say in some parts of the world.) Robin Williams' manic voice work is fun the first time you watch this, but subsequent viewings show you that he's just stomping all over the production. Still, it adds a spunk to what otherwise might have been a same-old/same-old version of this story. I liked Jafar as a villain when he was talking to Gilbert Gottfried and messing up Prince Abooboo's name, but when he turns into a genie at the end and starts making a series of puns that would make C3PO groan, it became clear that this script needed some editing. OK, I'm going to ask you to pause so that you can fully appreciate what I did with the C3PO reference there. I want you to let that want sink in a bit. Part of Disney's appeal is that they're able to take stories that are thousands of years old, inject them with some life, and transform them into something new. Despite a lot of annoyances that get in the way of this being really great, they do a good job with that. One thing I do like about this one compared to most Disney princess/prince movies: the romance is between a pair of well-developed characters rather than one developed character and a prop. Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty have a princess and a guy who might as well be a life-sized cardboard cut-out of a prince. Beauty and the Beast and this at least make the prince characters real, probably because they're titular. But my question: Is Aladdin really all that likable? Jafar's considered the bad guy because he's evil and all, but Aladdin is the one whose deceit causes all the problems anyway. As I say with a lot of Disney protagonists, kids could learn a lot more life lessons if Aladdin would have been punished in the end.

Summer of Nicolas Cage Movie # 19: Season of the Witch

2011 witch movie

Rating: 8/20

Plot: While looking out his window at the many sights to see and the different people to be, Mr. Leitch decides that he has to pick out every stitch because a rabbit's running in the ditch. Oh, no! Must be the season of the witch! He looks over his shoulder, and summer cat is looking over its shoulder at him. It's strange.

A movie based on a Donovan song? Starring Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman? With the cute-as-a-button Claire Foy spending the majority of the movie in a cage? Sign me up!

Nicolas Cage rocks the long hair and pretty much makes that face that you see on the poster up there throughout the entire movie. He and co-star Ron Perlman, the latter who should be pissed since I didn't see a single poster with him on it although his character is equally important, both swing a mean sword, slicing off goon-monks' heads and watching the life poof out the top of them in CGI dust spirals. I'm also not going to complain about getting to see Ron Perlman headbutt Satan because that's pretty awesome. But their performances are really wooden in this completely stiff period horror film. Ron Perlman's also only got a single facial expression. They and the entire movie are flat, devoid of personality. You know what this movie is like? It's like one of those t-shirts you can buy at a gas station, one of those with a giant cougar against a backdrop of stormy skies or a pair of dolphins penetrating a wall of bitchin' fire. It looks like the best shirt ever until you actually put it on and realize you bought it a two sizes too small and that your nipples distort the cougar's face and the fabric gives you a rash. And then you're sitting on the curb after finding out that you're four dollars and thirty-five cents short of being able to afford a sandwich at your favorite sub sandwich chain and that's the exact amount you spent on the shirt. A little girl and her mother pass by and the little girl says, "Mom, look at that crying man's shirt," and you decide that you're going to take your own life. That's what this movie is like. Dopey dark special effects puttering around during action sequences with outcomes that I have no interest in. All with this really big music whenever anything happens, apparently because my eyes alone can't tell when something really big happens. I hate that. It's like the filmmakers think that I'm stupid. There is the aforementioned headbutting-the-devil scene and another scene where, if you use your imagination a little, kind of looks like Nicolas Cage having sex with Satan. But you have to ignore the fact that they're both being really stabby throughout the whole thing. I also dug those bird gas mask things. But now I'm working pretty hard to find anything to like about this movie. It's a pretty joyless experience.

Question [Spoiler Alert!]: How did the girl end up naked at the end? Did I miss something?

Idiots and Angels

2008 adult cartoon

Rating: 16/20

Plot: He goes to work, he's mean to people, and he hangs out at the local bar where he lusts after the owner's wife. And that's about it for our protagonist until he wakes up one morning to discover wings growing on his back. They seem to have an effect on him--making him do good--so he desperately tries to get rid of them. Others try to figure out ways to exploit the wings for profit.

Easily my favorite Bill Plympton feature. Or featurette for that matter. See the color on the poster? Those are pretty much the colors you get throughout the film, but they're beautiful grays and they work well with the dream-like nature of the strange, Bukowski-esque plot, helping to set a definite tone and bringing a focus on the character and his flighty plight. I don't think there are any spoken words, just sound effects and a soundtrack provided by Pink Martini and Tom Waits. But there's still a lot of dark humor featuring the artist's usual shape-shifting characters who we get to spy on at their humorously lowest lows. Regardless of what I generally say about Plymptoons, I do like the way he animates character movement, and here, they move through his typically bleak settings in grossly poetic ways. Plympton's surreal hand-drawn animations are often very ugly, appropriately as ugly as human beings, and whereas I usually think they work better in small doses, this one just connects. I'll have to reread Marquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" to find parallels.

Gulliver's Travels

2010 comedy

Rating: 8/20 (Emma: 7/20; Abbey: dnf)

Plot: It's Jonathan Swift's classic piece of satire, filmed exactly as he intended it to be filmed. Jack Black, a mail room loser infatuated with the pretty girl on one of the upper floors, tells a few lies, plagiarizes a few lines, and winds up on a boat in the Bermuda Triangle to write a puff piece about his travels. He ends up shipwrecked and in the land of the diminutive Lilliputians. Oh, snap!

Wait a second! I was supposed to watch this in 3D, presumably because a three-dimensional Jack Black is going to be funnier than a boring old two-dimensional one. After a cute little animated opening which tricked me into thinking this would be better than I thought, we get Jack Black doing his Jack Black thang. Ad nauseum. You've got to give the guy a lot of credit--he tries really really hard. He takes material that isn't any good, hoists it upon his shoulders, and trounces across the screen in an attempt to carry it. His act's just gotten old though, and by the time his story in this reaches it's big musical conclusion, he's just become a giant parody of himself. The writers of this (you know, Jonathan Swift et. al.) fit the classic Jack Black pattern: make him really sad, then really loud, then repeat. After a preposterous set-up that is poorly written enough to take it completely out of reality, you get to the fantastical part of the story where some so-so special effects become the star. You get some really lame robot foreshadowing (How to build your own robot? Like that's gonna happen!) and the silliest product placement (a giant cola can) that you'll ever see. This also has to be the high point in Billy Connolly's career--being urinated upon by Jack Black. Connolly is the funniest thing about this movie, by the way, but his role is very small. Pun possibly intended. I liked Chris O'Dowd, too. He plays the villain and does a lot more with poor material than could have been reasonably expected. His character is the villain, but I'm not real sure how anybody's going to end up rooting for Gulliver in this. He lies, he's selfish, he's lazy. He commercializes Lilliput and gives bad advice to Jason Segel. When he's getting that wedgie from the robot (yep, that's the type of movie this is), you're almost rooting for the robot. Scratch that. You are rooting for the robot. At the end of this movie, the characters are trying to introduce a catch word "Boosh!" which I think might be a Cat in the Hat influence. Let me end this with a couple-few positives: 1) The stunt coordinator's name is Stink Fisher. 2) Anybody with a giant Amanda Peet fetish is likely to be satisfied. 3) There are some Lilliputian reenactments of Star Wars and Titanic (the funniest scene from Titanic where Rose tells Jack she'll never let him go and then immediately lets him go) that are kind of cute.