Movies Schmovies

Stocking Full of Shit: A Christmas Rap Round-Up

2011-12-22T20:52:00.000-08:00

Christmas is a douchebag. Its trappings are so gaudy that even St. Patrick’s Day comes off as the quiet, classy drunk in the corner of the bar in comparison. By some miracle, it manages to be the most overly commercialized holiday, while simultaneously serving as the most incredibly sanctimonious. And to top things all off, there’s just something about Christmas that seems to bring out everyone’s inner retard. (Don’t believe me? Drive to the mall tomorrow at about noon.)

All of these special ingredients mix together to form one of the most noxious concoctions known to man: Christmas rap.

Nasty Boys – All I Want For Christmas is to Get Crunk

The only reason I know about this song is because it was available for free download on iTunes about five years ago but any song that samples Tchaikovsky over lines like “dashing through the snow in a stolen Chevrolet” is well worth that price. Apparently, the Nasty Boys didn’t make Santa’s nice list, because even though they said it’s all they wanted for Christmas, I’ve still never heard them on the radio. Of course, they also said that “all” they wanted for Christmas was to be Jay-Z, be exonerated for multiple felonies, to get a “ho ho ho,” a T-Mobile Sidekick (which now, five years and several iPhone models later, even failed rappers could probably afford), payment of back child support and of course, to get crunk. Perhaps Santa didn’t appreciate their apparent misunderstanding of the “all I want for Christmas” song. Traditionally, “all” you want for Christmas is something simple like “you” or “my two front teeth,” but this ostensibly short list of Christmas wishes turns into the Spanish Inquisition.

J. Randall – Santa Gimme

So did you ever wonder what happened to Henry Rowengartner after guiding the Cubs to the World Series, and presumably being named the National League Rookie of the Year for 1993? Well, he’s been lying low for a while, and is finally launching his rap career under the name J Randall. And what better way to launch it than with a Christmas song? You see, around 400 B.C.E., ancient Sumerian rappers discovered the “my name is X and I’m here to say” cadence, and shortly thereafter discovered that Santa Claus’ association with the word “ho” offered the clever wordsmith an opportunity to discuss women of ill repute on Clear Channel radio stations. But for the subsequent two millennia, this bon mot was relegated to only single verses, a shame since such cutting wit really deserves an entire song. In all seriousness, though, for all that this video makes me think the Atlanta Hawks must have traded Kirk Heinrich to Def Jam Records (and his corporate sponsor is Bod), if all Christmas music were like this, I probably wouldn’t dread December anymore. I still wouldn’t like it, but you know, that’s something.

Ying Yang Twins – Carol of Da Bellz

Have you listened to the whole song? Really? Not just had it on while you were doing other stuff, but actually paid attention to what the Ying Yang Twins were saying? If you did, you’re ahead of me. I made it through exactly 1:24, less than half of the song. What you need to realize, though, is that there is a whole EP like this. The Ying Yang Twins recorded a Christmas album. Having listened to parts of several of the songs off the album, I can imagine only one scenario as to how such a thing came to be: Tired of hearing that the crunk rap that they (along with Lil Jon) are largely credited (blamed) with innovating is awful and uncreative, the Twins set out to defend their genre by showing that even if crunk music is just an uninspired collection of obnoxious noises repeated in a 3-5 minute loop, so is most Christmas music.

Busta Rhymes ft. Jim Carrey – Grinch

I once read a pretty convincing argument once that Dr. Seuss was the world’s greatest rapper. So a Christmas rap about one of Dr. Seuss’ most beloved characters is bound to be a hit right? Maybe, but this song is pretty determined to prove that theory wrong. First off, it’s a rap song written for a movie soundtrack. Strike one. Second of all, no good rap song has ever been written using the “rapper meets movie character” premise. The soundtracks of the 1990s stand as a hilarious monument to those many souls who tried and failed. Also, consider the following: the song is based on a shitty movie; it contains a children’s choir; you can’t understand most of the words; and of course, it is credited as “featuring” Jim Carrey, who unfortunately does sing-talk through most of the song. Oh, and did I mention that Busta Rhymes is a fucking human abortion? Seriously, of all the vile trends that came out of the 2000s – openly celebrating ignorance, teen girls having anal sex to preserve their virginities, voting for George W. Bush – not one of them can hold a fetid, shit-smeared candle up to Busta fuckin’ Rhymes. Listening to Busta Rhymes is like a napalm enema. Did you notice all of the noise that sounds like someone shouting and/or laughing during the chorus? Well now that you know it’s a Busta Rhymes song, you can easily identify the sound’s source: That’s the sound of Busta’s metaphorical dick ripping apart the metaphorical vagina of your childhood, then digging up the corpse of Boris Karloff, and going balls deep in his very real, very dead asshole.

Easy-E – Merry Muthafuckin Xmas

And there were in the same country, drivers in their cars, avoiding the all-Christmas music radio stations. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and hit seek on their radio, and they were terrified. And the angel said unto them: Fear not; for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you, is born this day in the city of Compton, a Savior, which is Easy Motherfucking E. And this shall be a sign unto you; you shall find his Christmas song on YouTube, because there’s no fucking way they could play this on the radio. And suddenly, there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying “Merry muthafuckin Xmas.”

Roger Klotz: American Badass

2011-07-28T16:37:00.000-07:00

The best part of any kid's show is that joke that you don't really get until you're too old to be legitimately watching the show. It's like an unspoken social contract between you and the writers: I won't tell anyone that incredibly dirty joke into the after-school animation bloc if you don't tell anyone that I was watching it.

There are some real classics, and then there is the dirtiest thing ever spoken on television, compliments of Doug:

Two lessons, kids: 1) Roger Klotz doesn't fuck around with his insults. 2) Don't fucking call yourself Skeeter.

No

2011-07-13T17:22:00.000-07:00

I've spent a lot of money in my life. I probably own a conservative down payment on a house in suits. My book budget over the last five years blows away that of small town libraries. If I had all of that -- plus the money I've spent on awful movies -- back, I'd invest it like this, and on August 3, when the rest of the country is still Googling the word "default," I'd be retiring.

Suffice it to say that won't be happening. But while I will be suffering through the same apocalyptic double-dip recession as the rest of you, I will be doing it with somewhere between $2,000 and $3,000 worth of albums and memorabilia related to 1970s progressive rock band Yes. That would be one of every album on CD (two of some), all of the good albums on vinyl (and some of the less-than-good ones too). I've been to a couple of their concerts, have a t-shirt or two, and own a nifty foamcore poster autographed all of the members of the band's second best lineup.

Like I said, I've spent a lot of money in my life. And yet, the purchase I regret the most -- without question -- is the $20 I spent on the new Yes album, "Fly From Here." I once bought a 2000-model MP3 player that connected to your computer via parallel port, and even though it turned out to be too old to interface with my Windows Millennium Edition, it now looks like a savvy purchase in a post-"Fly From Here" world.

On the surface, buying this album is a no brainer. The Roger Dean album art is back. Win. The album is supposed to mark a return to the large-scale epics that defined the band's best years in the early 1970s. Major win. And the title of the album's signature song, "We Can Fly From Here," is so perfectly Yes; it's the perfect set up for the band that gave us "Tales from Topographic Oceans," "Keys to Ascension" and "The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus)" to once again mix their stream of consciousness imagery with musical virtuosity.

Looks can be deceiving. It was disappointing to hear that classically-tinged rock keyboard player Rick Wakeman wouldn't be involved, but that's not the end of the world; Wakeman's son Oliver would be filling in. I'd love Rick Wakeman, but I'm willing to take a flyer on the guy who it would appear has spent his entire life trying to be him. Oh wait, Oliver quit too? That's not good. Still, it's a Yes album; I own them all. I may as well give it a shot. Besides, the core of the band -- bassist Chris Squire, guitarist Steve Howe, drummer Alan White and iconic lead singer Jon Anderson -- have produced good music even without Wakeman.

What? You've got to be shitting me; they kicked Jon Anderson out of the band? How the fuck does that even work? How do you have Yes without the keyboard player and lead singer? Well, on the plus side, at least it means the band is done. There's no way in hell they could record an album without a singer. Oh, I see; you bring in the guys from The Buggles. But who's going to sing? What are you going to do, hire a singer from a tribute band like that stupid Marky Mark movie? No fucking way!?! Benoit David?

This all played out over the course of two years, leading up to today, when I pushed aside a physical sense of dread, and purchased "Fly From Here." It's just shameful. Instead of the classical-progressive rock fusion that coined the term "Bach 'n' Roll," "Fly From Here" offers really long, really boring pop songs. And the title track, for all its promise of a song invoking the image of flight as a spiritual and emotional metaphor, turns out to literally be a song about a fucking airport.

A bonus "Making Of" DVD only makes this $20 investment worse, because it only means there's more of it.

So CD in hand, I wandered through the mall, identifying the following items that I would feel better about buying:

Duke University Championship Banner -- $49.95

Waterford Crystal Ashtray -- $179.99

Cleveland Browns Window Cling -- $4.99

No fucking clue -- "Uhhh, Make me an offer..."

Really gay shirt* -- $79.95

*Indicates items I may have purchased.

Justin Beiber Cardboard Stand-Up -- $34.99

Ed Hardy Cologne Set -- $75.00

105 Minutes of Forcible Sodomy -- $3.99

Pewter Statue of a Demon Playing a Saxophone Solo -- $150

Yes, yes, yes, long exaggerated list of ridiculous crap (and one awesome shirt) that I'd rather own than "Fly From Here." Funny. Unfortunately, if you've read this far, you probably just want to hear it more. Fucking don't.

Deep Thought

2011-07-07T19:17:00.000-07:00

Mix Han Solo and Sam Malone: Baloo from "TaleSpin."

A cocky, for-hire pilot having adventures while growing to have a filial relationship with a teenage orphan. That covers about half of your average "TaleSpin" episode. The other half is about his antagonistic/flirtatious relationship with the shrewd businesswoman who bought out his business and installed herself as his boss, straight out of the Ted Danson/Kirstie Alley years of "Cheers."

George Lucas is a Genius

2011-06-18T11:52:00.000-07:00

Ever since The Phantom Menace, people have been complaining about how George Lucas ruined the Star Wars series through a series of stupid plot points and plodding movies. After all, he took two of the most badass, fan-beloved characters in the series...

...and turned them into annoying, whiny bitches:

Not only that, but it introduced annoying characters like Jar-Jar Binks and then proceeded to make them central to the mythos (go ahead, try to forget about him. Try to explain the backstory of the Empire, the driving force behind the trilogy that you actually like, without noting that Jar-Jar Binks cast the deciding vote to making Palpatine Emperor). It's really almost surprising that we weren't treated to a shot of young Han and Lando whining at each other over a game of space-marbles or something.

But while watching bits of Attack of the Clones on Spike today, I think Jon and I stumbled onto the truth. This wasn't George Lucas being some dumbass hack who can't write dialogue or a coherent plot, who thinks that political discussion between two unlikable one-dimensional characters belongs in the middle of the second film of a trilogy.

No, this was George Lucas, the genius who has had to deal with legions of Star Wars fans for the last thirty years. George Lucas, the man who couldn't escape from under the shadow of this fucking trilogy if he tried--and if he did, he'd still end up under the shadow of the Indiana Jones films.

So this is George Lucas's letter to the fans: Hey, you know those badass characters? Those mysterious and awesome people that you've been pestering me about for decades? Well, it turns out that they're whiny fucking bitches...Just. Like. You.

And man, after falling right out of Star Wars fandom, I can totally sympathize with that. Lucas knows that his fans want to identify with the characters, and so he's thrown them the biggest bone ever: now you can identify directly with Boba Fett and Darth Vader--the fans' favorite characters!--who have become whiny, obnoxious little shits that ruin the whole goddamn experience. It's...it's kind of brilliant in its spitefulness.

So good on you, George.

An Open Letter to Charlie Daniels

2010-09-19T21:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Charlie,

I couldn't help but think that M. Night Shyamalan would have been better served to take a cue from you, and end his recent crapfest "Devil" with a fiddle contest between Satan and his would-be victim.

But as I imagine the logistics of such a scene, I am overwhelmed with questions. I would appreciate your clarification.

How can the devil be "way behind"? The implication being that the devil is not meeting his soul quota. Who sets the devil's quotas? Assuming the devil is not an all-consuming perfectionist utterly committed to self improvement (for reasons which will soon become apparent), the only imaginable force that could literally compel the devil to meet a regular soul quota is god. But this really just raises more questions than it answers. Why does a loving god want the devil to steal souls at all? Why is he pushing him to be the best devil he can be by enforcing a quota system, which apparently is unobtainable?

Moreover, what exactly is god's leverage on the devil? Apparently, the devil is "in a bind," which would imply that there is some consequence for failing to meet his soul quota. But what's god going to do, send him to hell? If god could do something worse to the devil than he's already done to him, why hasn't he done it already? But maybe I'm looking at this wrong; is this a case where god is using positive reinforcement? Is the devil in the running for some sort of demonic employee of the month award? It's hard to imagine that god would reward the devil for stealing souls, but then again, there's the Book of Job.

Now, Charlie, I suppose it's possible that the devil being "way behind" is a comparison relative to the souls god is collecting. Sounds like a pretty reasonable answer, right? I just have a hard time reconciling the chorus of your proto-Tea Party anthem "Simple Man."

"What's wrong with the world" -- not just the United States, not just a couple states or a particular political or religious ideology, but the world damn world -- is that people "done gone put their Bibles away." So there's really no reason why the devil should be "way behind," especially considering that a vast majority of the world's population has never read and does not believe in the words in the Bible. Add 1.5 billion Muslims, another billion Hindus, another 500 million Buddhists, 13 million Jews and safely another billion atheists, pagans, Jains, Shintos, Wiccans, Rastafarians, Scientologists, Mormons, cult, native and folk religious believers and good handful of Christians who are doing it wrong, and that should give the devil a pretty comfortable advantage. That's not even counting the literally trillions of people who lived and died before the completion of the Christian Bible. Charlie, I'm not going to suggest that you're one of those unitarian types who believes these people would all be godly souls simply on the merits of being good people. That would be an insult both to you, and to the universalists.

Just how far behind is "way behind," anyway? If he's really that far behind, shouldn't he probably be working on a larger scale than trying to con bumpkins one by one? It seems that he would be better served by turning kids onto some hip new form of blasphemy, or drug addiction or buttsex. Maybe he could post links at message boards claiming to have a video of Lindsay Lohan blowing a dolphin which actually directs viewers to a video which will take them to hell.

But then again, your devil isn't very bright, is he Charlie?

He's spent ten god damn years preparing for a rematch and he gets beat by the same fucking song? This is why I can't believe that the devil is in the least bit self-motivated. Anyone who would hold themselves so strictly to a quota system would have learned to play a better song before demanding a rematch. If god weren't give him a quota, he'd be sitting around in hell playing Shaq-Fu on his Super Nintendo while subsisting on an all-Cheetos diet.

Furthermore, if he were already "way behind" 10 years ago, wouldn't spending a decade pacing around hell fuming about one bad bet either put him hopelessly out of the running for the soul contest or somehow even more on god's bad side for having failed to meet his monthly quota?

I'm afraid I also need some clarification on the devil's betting system. Just how much is this guy bound by his word? Just enough that he can admit when he's been defeated, but not enough to keep him from go back for a consent-free rematch? Why not just keep going back and challenging Johnny at really inopportune times until he finally loses? Why not wake him up at 3 a.m. screaming "fiddle contest, bitch!"? How about right after a double shift at work? Mid-coitus? For that matter, why doesn't the devil just go back to Jesus and ask if he wants to try that whole crucifixion thing again?

Is this the same devil who took on Daniel Webster? At least that one was bright enough to use a third party arbiter. He even had the foresight to stack the jury. And he decides this fiddle contest can be settled by mutual acclamation? Is the devil getting dumber?

I'm having a hard time understanding why you would challenge a kid to beat you at something you know he's good at. Twice. How fucking stupid is the devil? Has this idiot ever managed to steal a soul? Hell must be filled with the most gullible people imaginable, and even they're kicking themselves for falling for the same old shit again.

Come to think of it, Charlie, there's no need for you to waste your time answering my questions, because I already know the answers. You see, I've been to hell. I was in the theater showing "Devil."

50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

2010-08-16T19:35:00.000-07:00

There are many enduring mysteries in pop/rock music: "what did Billy Joe McAllister and his girlfriend throw off the Tallahatchie Bridge?" and "What won't Meat Loaf do for love?" and "What the hell is 'froggy style'?" Paul Simon has contributed to this choral cold case file a couple of times, and while it'd be nice to know what he and Julio were doing down by the schoolyard, the more compelling mystery comes from his 1975 hit, "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover."

I imagine that most of you are familiar with the song, but here's the capsulized version in case you aren't: the narrator, presumably Simon, is meeting with a woman who wants to help him leave his lover. She tells him that there must be fifty ways to do so, but they really only discuss five (arguably six).

This makes some sense; a couple is having dinner or some other quick meeting, and they're able to rattle off five ways to leave lovers pretty quickly, so it's not too much of a stretch to say "if we can think of this many this quickly, then there must be, like, fifty." But without elaborating on those other ways, I think the listeners are right in feeling a little cheated. Here's the established list:

Slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
Don't need to be coy, Roy
Hop on the bus, Gus
Drop off the key, Lee

The arguable one is "just get yourself free," which is repeated.

I've seen other attempts to flesh out the fifty ways, but they often devolve into "five ways to leave your lover, and forty-five ways to kill them," which is not how the line goes. So I'm going to do one better. Here's my attempt to help you in your struggle to be free: the missing forty-five ways to leave your lover.

Write up a scene, Jean
Do it on stage, Paige
Sing it in chorus, Morris
Take out an ad, Tad
Act like a dick, Nick
Bail on a date, Nate
Call her a bitch, Mitch
Say he smells bad, Brad
Say he's too small, Saul
Stick her with the bill, Will
Tell her she's fat, Pat
Give her a spank, Frank
Make him feel pain, Jane
Take him to a bris, Kris
You could just beat 'er, Peter
Don't brush your teeth, Keith
Live like a slob, Bob
Bogart his weed, Reid
Say you've got crabs, Babs
Give him VD, Bree
Dump him for his twin, Lynn
Say that you're gay, Jay
Say you're a man, Ann
Have sex with her dad, Chad
Do it through text, Rex
Do it by phone, Joan
Send it by mail, Gail
Just go for a drive, Clive
Pack up and leave, Steve
Tell her you're dead, Ted
Shave all his hair, Clare
Sell her as a slave, Dave
Blaspheme her god, Todd
Just pull the plug, Doug
Fake your own death, Beth
Give her no space, Chase
Make him feel blue, Sue
Say "go to Hell", Nell
Sing "You're so Vain," Lane
Take back her ring, Bing
Say you won't marry, Gary
Get up and get gone, Dawn
Just say how you feel, Neil
Tell her the truth, Ruth
Just try 'em all, Paul

And get yourself free.

My Shitty Taste

2010-08-12T19:59:00.000-07:00

Yes, I get "Ok Computer," I like Vampire Weekend and own The Postal Service album on vinyl (it does sound better). But there are plenty of reasons why you should never allow yourself to be persuaded by anything I write on this blog. With this occasional feature, I humbly submit to you the ever-growing list of reasons why my Rolling Stone subscription should be revoked.
-- I prefer the studio version of "Hotel California" to the "Hell Freezes Over" version.
-- I saw Tommy Tutone in concert. Last year.
-- The album Liz Phair made with Avril Lavine's songwriters: Awesome.
-- "Tik Tok" was my favorite song of 2009.
-- I have downloaded two songs because they were on "Glee." I have downloaded five songs because they were on "Degrassi."
-- I have asked a DJ to play "The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald" on the radio.
-- As a DJ, I have played "The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald" on the radio.
-- I love "We Didn't Start the Fire."

-- I own a Maroon 5 album. If I hadn't bought a new car it would still be in the front seat with me.

-- I know all the words to "Mambo No. 5."
-- Yes is a better band than Pink Floyd.
-- I can't get into "The National."
-- I have both "Convoy" and it's sequel song on my iPhone.
-- I own no fewer than 15 songs about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
-- "Toxic" was my favorite Britney Spears song. That was before she released "3."
-- I loved Jason Mraz's first album. I was disappointed by his second album. I was horrified by his third album.
-- As I write this, I am listening to "The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald."

The Tragic Tale of DJ Khaled

2010-07-19T14:24:00.000-07:00

If you listen to as much Top 40 radio as I do, you've probably heard DJ Khaled's¹ song "All I Do is Win." What you might not have noticed is the tragic undercurrent of that song, emphasizing the unique pain of DJ Khaled's life.

The tragedy is apparent right from the first line of the song:

All I do is win win win, no matter what

At first glance, this may sound like DJ Khaled lives a charmed life, successful in anything he puts his mind to. And I'm sure that was probably how Khaled felt when he first discovered this quirk of his existence. However, as any Twilight Zone fan will tell you, a world without loss--or even the possibility of loss, is not necessarily a pleasant one. Errors are what allow us to grow as people, and the chance of loss is what makes games and sports thrilling, what gives value to our possessions, what makes us cherish the things we have.

Sure, having an unbroken lifetime winning streak would be nice for the money and prestige--and Khaled says as much, noting that he's "got money on [his] mind"--but it would certainly become boring after awhile. Khaled's next line makes this clear, saying of money that he "can never get enough." His inability to lose has taken the thrill and satisfaction out of his moneymaking endeavors, leaving his desire for cash insatiable. No longer can he find a sense of accomplishment in his work, no longer does his calling fulfill him, he now works to continue accumulating money the way an addict continuously increases his dosage to try to outpace his body's acclimation to the drug and get the same high that much smaller doses once offered. Eventually, addicts become so inured to the sensation that they must keep using just to feel normal; this is how money has become to perpetual winner DJ Khaled.

But the really sad detail is in Khaled's almost supernatural influence on other people. As he explains:

And every time I step up in the building,
Everybody [sic] hands go up
And they stay there

Were this a simple manner of people recognizing Khaled's inability to lose and expressing immediate surrender, it would be one thing. But were that the case, we would only expect those who planned to compete with Khaled to throw their hands into the air in a show of acquiescence. No, the truth is far more bizarre: due to some unknown force, upon the moment DJ Khaled enters a building, everyone inside--through no volition of their own--puts their hands in the air and makes them stay there.

The more one thinks about such an ability, the more apparent its nuisance becomes. Leaving aside the problem of body odor, imagine trying to eat at a restaurant where none of the other patrons, nor the cooks or wait staff, can lower their arms below their heads. Picture attending a hockey match where everyone is high-sticking or a basketball game where 'the wave' is hampered by the crowd's inability to put their arms down. DJ Khaled must bag his own groceries. When DJ Khaled goes to dances, the song is "YYYY." There are sex acts that DJ Khaled can only enjoy outdoors.

And do you know how many unfortunate misunderstandings have happened due to routine trips to the bank? DJ Khaled just wants to make a deposit, but all any passing police officer sees is a black guy in a bank where everyone else has their hands up.

Sure, there's some enjoyment to be had with this unusual ability. By repeatedly entering and exiting a building in quick succession, DJ Khaled can cause everyone to rapidly raise and lower their hands. The backing vocals reference this explicitly--"up, down, up, down, up, down"--but the novelty of that game wears thin rather quickly.

Khaled has persevered in the face of this adversity, finding solace in a musical career, where large numbers of people holding their hands in the air signify adulation and excitement. Off the stage, however, his ability is far more a curse than a blessing.

So next time you hear "All I Do is Win," make sure you appreciate DJ Khaled's courage in making his condition public and taking ownership of it. For me, if I ever find myself with my hands uncontrollably held in the air, I'll know that DJ Khaled must be in the building. Should that happen, I'll seek him out, tell him how inspired I am by his strength in the face of adversity, and while I may not be able to shake his hand, I can always wave.

1. And a cornucopia of guest stars. Little-known fact: rap's primary influences were African music, Disco, Funk/Soul, and The Brady Bunch Variety Hour.

Clash of the Remakes

2010-03-13T02:25:00.001-08:00

I recently watched the original "Clash of the Titans," having never actually seen it--or, for that matter, pretty much any other Harryhausen film. I've always been a big mythology buff, so it was an easy sell for me. Plus, it gave me lots of opportunities to make jokes about Veronica Mars and Professor McGonagall in a toga.

Overall, I really enjoyed the movie. It took a little bit for the plot to get going, but once it did, it kept going. I was impressed by the quick pacing, especially given just how much was crammed into the movie. Between Perseus and Andromeda's personal drama, the various challenges, and the conflicts between the gods, "Clash of the Titans" is full to brimming with plot elements, but it never feels like it's trying to do too much. The moderately episodic story works, which is not usually the case for movies with this much story. But more than that, after a point it seems like there's a crazy stop-motion battle every ten minutes or so, which maintains the action all the way through to the end.

The special effects are a bit of a mixed bag. The claymation enemies are gorgeously detailed, and the switches from actors in makeup to clay figures is generally done well. They do tend to move unnaturally and a little choppily, which is to be expected. It doesn't always take away from the film, though--when dealing with inhuman monsters like Medusa, a little unnatural motion just drives home the point. There's a bit of the uncanny valley going on, and it makes the monsters a bit more unsettling in several cases. Generally, the worst part of the special effects were the bluescreen bits, where the dark lines around the inserted actors or inserted creatures were often readily apparent.

One thing I really enjoyed was the way they flipped around Clarke's Third Law. We usually see it in sci-fi, where some hi-tech species or entity or time traveler, or some superpowerful alien race, uses technology to pose as a wizard or a god. Here, instead, we see the gods expressing their magical powers through advanced technology--first, a steel sword; then, a talking shield that initially sounds like it's speaking through an electronic speaker; finally, a robotic owl, because robots, that's why. In "Titans," magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology, and I think that's an idea that more fantasy stories should pick up on.

The reason I bring all this up is because apparently Warner Brothers has decided to remake "Clash of the Titans," with the release coming in early April. Normally, I'd balk at the idea of remaking a film that's already perfectly good, but I'm actually kind of excited to see how "Titans" looks with modern special effects wizardry. Judging from the previews, I think the 2010 Kraken looks to be more menacing than the 1981 version (though I did like the four arms, and I hope that feature remains--I can't tell from the trailers I've seen), but I also think the Kraken ought to have a bit more in the way of tentacles.

Judging from the cast and the previews, I'd imagine that the new version will be just as action-oriented as the original. My primary worry is that they'll jettison everything that made "Clash of the Titans" distinctive: the complex episodic plot, the web of intertwining conflicts between men and gods, and especially the reverse backflip 3rd Law thing. Okay, the comic relief robot owl was kind of a late-'70s, early-'80s vintage thing (see also: Buck Rogers), and I can see where that might not fit the tone of a modern action flick. But stripping away too many of those elements will leave you with just that: a typical modern action flick. And a movie like "Clash of the Titans" should be at least a little better than that.

I'm hoping to see the new version around opening weekend, so hopefully I'll have a wrap-up post in a couple of weeks. One way or another, it'll be worth talking about.

Unsolicited Advice: An Open Letter to Will Smith

2010-02-24T19:30:00.001-08:00

Dear Will,

I'll see your remake of "The Karate Kid." The fact that you and your wife put up the money for this movie so your son could have a starring role opposite Jackie Chan is pretty damn shameless, and he looks like a pretty wretched actor, but the trailer makes it look more creative than I would have expected from a remake.

That's why I'm writing to you. It looks like you're trying to best Ralph Macchio for realistic martial arts, and that's great, but I can't help but assume from your trailer than this means you have thrown over the famous "wax on, wax off" training. Don't get me wrong, I too question the practical application of waxing the car and painting the fence, but this means that an entire generation of young moviegoers are going to be without the unadulterated hilarity of t-shirts that read "Mr. Miyagi Wax Off."

But I can't complain, because you haven't killed the legacy of sophomoric masturbation humor derived from improvised methods of kung fu instruction, you've added to it. In this trailer, Jackie Chan's new Mr. Miyagi -- reimagined as Mr. Han -- teaches the new Daniel-san -- reimagined as Dre -- by having him take his coat off and put it back on again, at one point delivering this instantly immortal cinematic gem:

"JACKET OFF!"

Don't listen to much Blink 182, do you, Will? Ok, so the obvious cut in the sound makes me think that this line won't be in the final film, but I've viewed this trailer on enough legitimate film websites to make me think it is, actually, in the trailer, and even that is a great gift. The "Mr. Han says jacket off" t-shirts will be even funnier, even if no one is going to know who Mr. Han is.

So Will, I'm not sure what kind of audience you're hoping to attract by featuring Jackie Chan yelling "jacket off" to an 11-year-old boy in your trailer, but I know one movie blog that will forever appreciate your contribution to kung fu puerility.

Music Schmusic: Worst Decade Ever Pt. 10

2010-01-25T20:22:00.000-08:00

I’ll admit it, I started this project without any real list of which ten songs I thought were the worst of the decade, but I thought I had a pretty good idea. Turns out I underestimated my knowledge of truly awful music, because I had a lot of ideas. So many songs, like Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5,” Bob Carlisle’s “Butterfly Kisses” and LFO’s “Summer Girls,” were necessarily excluded because they came just a few months too early. I had to make a concerted effort to avoid country songs, or I’d still be writing this in 2020. But even with those initial exemptions, I was left with a vast array of possibilities.

My goal, then, became to represent the widest possible selection of the worst music from this worst decade. Some songs, even ones I really hate like “Fireflies” by Owl City, were excluded to compensate for any bias toward new shit over old shit; if I ever put together a list of the worst Postal Service rip-offs, expect Owl City to be a strong contender for No. 1. Of course, Fergie and the Black Eyed Peas would be nowhere without Gwen Stefani, who gave us the impossibly awful “Wind it Up” and surpassed even Hall and Oats for the worst song called “Rich Girl.” Sorry, “Use Somebody” by Kings of Leon; it’s not that you don’t make me want to vomit, you do, you really do – it’s just that you were released amid a real shitstorm of awful songs. Mariah Carey, I don’t think the world was ready for “Touch My Body,” a song about how you’ll fuck a stranger and rub your thighs around his face, for “just a little taste,” but if he’s secretly videotaping your sexcapades, you’ll kill him…Ok, so this one deserves an honorable mention for coming off as the creepiest fucking thing ever recorded, I just don’t want to think about it anymore.

Let’s not forget rappers, because they could have made a top 100 unto themselves. Ja Rule’s “Mesmerize,” Lil Kim’s “How Many Licks,” Chingy’s “Right Thurr,” Khia’s “My Neck, My Back,” Akon’s entire fucking catalogue all should have made the list. Somehow, I gave R. Kelly a pass, despite the fact that his 22-part, 84-minute opus “Trapped in the Closet” contained lyrics like “And she said please no don't stop/ And I said I caught a cramp/ And she said please keep on goin'/ I said my leg is about to crack/ Then she cries out/ Oh my goodness, I'm about to climax/ And I said cool/ Climax/ Just let go of my leg,” he released a remix of a song that had never had an original mix, oh and he pissed on some chick’s head a videotaped it.

I could go on and on, but I said I would cap it at ten (posts, not songs), and here we are. The previous nine installments were in no particular order; they are simply organized by the ever-changing standard I call “Which awful song could I stand listening to ten times in succession today?” That being said, today’s final song came to mind as soon as I started this project, and I’ve been saving this one – which truly is the worst song on the list – for last.

Crazy Town – Butterfly (2001)

This song sneaks up on you. You hear the guitar fade in and you think “Gimme Shelter” is about to start. But you correct yourself when you recognize the melody; wait a second, this is that Red Hot Chili Peppers’ song. Then the lyrics kick in, and before you can react, you feel like you’re being sodomized with a Garden Weasel.

I actually have a hard time listening to this entire song in one sitting. It’s the kind of thing where I have to get up and take a break, allow my ears to stop bleeding, and listen to the rest later. Why, you ask, is this song any more difficult than seven Nickelback songs? Well, simply put, this is a rap metal love song, and to do rap metal right, you have to really believe deep down that you’re better than the guys who do metal, and you’re way better than the guys who do rap. You don’t write songs about thongs or bathin’ apes; you write songs about concepts and…uh…stuff. Your songs have lines like “I thought that happy endings were only in the books I read,” because check yo’self, bitches, you’re literate. What this means for the listener is that, not only is “Butterfly” infectiously catchy to the point that I’ll wake up at least one day every other week with “hey sugar mama come and dance with me/the smartest thing you ever did was take a chance with me” stuck in my head, it also manages to come off as incredibly pretentious. And if your songs sound like Crazy Town, you’ve got nothing to be pretentious about.

On first listen, “Butterfly” could easily be a love song that is really about Jesus. Lyrics like “You lift me up,” “I knew a better life existed, but thought I missed it,” and “You showed me life is precious” are just the kind of dog whistle lines that make up covert Christian pop. Shit, “I was lost now I’m found” is taken directly from “Amazing Grace.” I’d be all set to brand Crazy Town another band that writes Christian songs, advertises to Christian teens, tours with Christian bands, but doesn’t want to be considered “Christian rock,” were it not the implication that god has got you sprung with his tongue ring.

The amount of weird sexuality in this song is unreal. Let’s see, the repetitive chorus is “come my lady, come, come my lady.” Believe me, in this situation begging rarely works. And let’s not overlook the line “Fierce nipple pierce,” either. The fact that they missed the obvious double entendre in the line about happy endings being only in books is really a testament to the quality of songwriting we’re dealing with here. (Or perhaps the more unsettling thought: Maybe they didn’t miss the double entendre; maybe I did.)

Overall, this song is supposed to sound like wooing, but it comes off more like sexual harassment. The video confirms that this song is basically a woman walking past a construction site set to music, as bandmates Shifty Shellshock, Epic Mazur, Trouble Valli, SQRL and Faydoedeelay keep jumping in front of each other to shout increasingly inane pick up lines at the camera. A bunch of shirtless guys with stupid nicknames in a fantastical garden; it’s kind of like the Bollywood production of Jersey Shore.

A lot of the songs on this list can make the listener wonder whether or not life is worth living anymore, but that usually takes multiple listens. Crazy Town manages to achieve this in half a verse, the lyrics of which are so irritating, ridiculous and mind-numbingly stupid that to hear them is to go through the Kübler-Ross stages of grief. First denial: No, there’s no way in hell they just said “whatever tickles your fancy.” No one spoke like that in 2001, with the possible exception of my grandmother, and I highly doubt she’s living a double life as Shifty Shellshock. Anger: Why the fuck am I still listening to this song? It’s like eating candy out of a dumpster. Sure, there’s probably something sweet underneath it all, but all I can taste is rancid mayonnaise. Bargaining: I was wrong to not believe in you, and I’ll take back every blasphemy I’ve ever spoken, written or thought about you if you’ll just save me, Underdog. Depression: This is the way the world ends; not with a bang, but with Crazy Town. And just as you’re coming upon acceptance – the realization that this song will be the death of you – they hit you with the mother of all abysmal pop lines: “Girl, it’s me and you like Sid and Nancy.”

Oh, Underdog, thou hast forsaken us.

Any woman who hears that line from a guy…fuck, any person who hears that line from anyone can’t run away fast enough. Sure, lines like this are pretty prevalent throughout pop music; The Reflections compared a relationship to Romeo and Juliet all the way back in 1962, although they forgot the line “Our love’s going to end when I drink poison, and you plunge a dagger into your heart, just like Romeo and Juliet.” But the specifics of Sid Vicious’ and Nancy Spungen’s story make its use as a simile a little more disturbing. Take Sid’s tragic drug addiction for example, or his battle with Hepatitis, or the fact that Sid fucking stabbed Nancy to death and left her to die in their hotel while he went out to buy drugs, and that after he realized what he had done he had his mother help him commit suicide.

I can only guess at how a line this bizarre made it into the song. Maybe Crazy Town wants to kill us. After listening to the entire song, I can attest that this is a distinct possibility. Or maybe they truly are warped enough to see Sid and Nancy as some sort of punk rock Romeo and Juliet, although I’m not quite sure how Nancy Spungen’s very much alive parents feel about that one. Does this mean that in 20 years we’ll have pop songs saying “Girl, it’s me and you like Nicole an OJ” and “Girl, it’s me and you like Jacko and Propofol?”

But however it got there, the line really solidifies the overall feel of the song. Because having your mother inject you with a massive dose of heroin, having Hepatitis or bleeding to death in a hotel bathroom all sound like a pleasant alternatives to having to hear “Come my lady/Come, come my lady/You’re my butterfly/Sugar/Baby” ever again.

Music Schmusic: Worst Decade Ever Pt. 9

2010-01-20T18:08:00.000-08:00

I’ve been putting this one off. But I can’t keep quiet any longer. I’ve been listening to a lot of Nickelback recently, trying to get ready for this post. And I need to bring this to your attention, because I believe it is an urgent threat to our national and moral fabric:

Grown men, singing lyrics that sound like tween girls’ poetry. You can’t deny it’s out there, and you can’t deny that it’s growing. Take Nickelback lead singer Chad Kroeger for example; he looks like a man, and he sings like a belt sander, but the words that come sound like a middle school poetry slam.

It comes down to one of two possibilities: Either there are large men hunched over their computers in darkened rooms, trolling LiveJournal for suitably sappy poetry, or, perhaps more disturbingly, there are secret sweatshops packed full of tween girls, toiling away in a 2x2 workspace – their only possessions being a laptop computer and the complete collection of “One Tree Hill” DVDs – forced to churn out page after page of angst-ridden lyrics. The members of Nickelback oversee this factory of tears, offering a meager wage only to those who produce album-worthy material; a once-daily bathroom break is afforded only to the girls who provide singles.

I know, I know. This sounds crazy. And I sure don’t have a lot of hoitey toitey academic degrees or evidence of even facts. I’m just a guy asking questions.

You could say that listening to all this Nickelback has made me crazy. But what if I’m right? Sure it all seems like a coincidence, but what if it’s more than that? What if…I’m sorry I usually don’t get so emotional. I just love…pop music…(sob)… so…much.

Someday (2003)

Nickelback - Someday

Alan | MySpace Video
“Someday” has one of the worst videos of all time. We lay out scene in a couple’s kitchen. The woman is crying over something she read on the in the newspaper. Sometimes those “Cathy” strips hit a little too close to home for me, too. Her boyfriend is watching her, as she rushes to pack her suitcase and runs out to her car. He chases after, only to see her get into a terrible auto accident and die. As a crowd gathers to look at the mangled body, the boyfriend watches as his girlfriend materializes in spirit form, and is reunited with him. Turns out the story she was crying over earlier was her boyfriend’s obituary. He was a ghost the whole time, and now she is too thanks to suicide. What a ~~touching~~ no, ~~heartwarming~~ er, ~~life-affirming~~ , deeply troubling and morally questionable ending. That works. Hiring M. Night Shyamalan to direct your music video? That doesn’t.

The song is nothing to be proud of either, complete with lyrics like “Now the story’s played out like this/just like a paperback novel/Let’s rewrite an ending that fits/instead of a Hollywood horror.” Yeah, I learned about similes and metaphors in grade school, too.

Far Away (2006)

This, one of Nickelback’s most maudlin efforts, is a great opportunity to explain what I mean about Nickelback’s lyrics. The listener is faced with the same disconnect you get from Hinder, where a big, burly guy with a big, burly voice is singing really trite lyrics. I call them tween girl lyrics, not to denigrate female songwriters – because there’s no question that there have been many amazing female songwriters – but because the level of poetry is juvenile, and the syrupy romantic subject matter has been indigenous to young girls’ diaries for decades.

Listening to “Far Away” provides a moment of clarity: For as weird as it sounds to have these lyrics coming from the mouth of this man-bear, it’s really Nickeback’s saving grace, because no girl group could get away with singing these lyrics. If Liz Phair or Ann Wilson or Joni Mitchell wrote a song with lyrics like “I have loved you all along/And I miss you/Been far away for far too long/I keep dreaming you'll be with me/and you'll never go” none of them would be taken seriously. If they sang the line “Stop breathing if I don't see you anymore” they’d be accused of setting the female musicians back to the era of “He Hit Me (And it Felt Like a Kiss).”

But you can almost forget about the awful lyrics of “Far Away” by watching its awful video. Right off the bat, Kroeger makes the regrettable decision to park his donkey face right in front of the camera, as if to really drive home the grown man-tween girl disconnect. But it’s the cutaway sequences, which tell the story of a fire jumper and his lady friend that really win for me. The whole think kind of feels like they spun the Hero Wheel to write this video.

Chad Kroeger: So how about we make our video about a soldier being called up to fight in Iraq?
Whoever the fuck else is in Nickelback: Dude, isn’t that a little controversial? Besides, ever other band is going to have a solider in their video.
Chad Kroeger: Ok, how about the SWAT team guy who defuses bombs and shit?
Whoever the fuck else is in Nickelback: No, that’s played out.
Chad Kroeger: Well fuck, man, we need a hero for the video.
Whoever the fuck else is in Nickelback: How about an inner-city teacher; they’re the real heroes.
Chad Kroeger: Where’s the action? The video needs to be really EXTREME to distract people from the shitty lyrics.
Whoever the fuck else is in Nickelback: Ok, how about a letter carrier…
Chad Kroeger: Have you been popping pills from a Pez dispenser again?
Whoever the fuck else is in Nickelback: Hear me out, man. A letter carrier…in space.
Chad Kroeger: Huh?
Whoever the fuck else is in Nickelback: You know, the guy who has to deliver mail to the space station.
Chad Kroeger: Whatever, we’re doing it about a fire fighter. He’ll go try to put out a fire in an empty field or something, and some big ass tree will fall on him.

That’s more or less what happens. The fire fighter and his wife/girlfriend/concubine/sister/I don’t really know are looking at a photo album/yearbook/picture book/Kama Sutra in bed when he is called away (far away, presumably) by his fire jumper team. The woman watches on TV – aided by the helpful and realistic news captions like “Huge forest fire!”

It’s actually pretty impressive that a video about fire fighting can seem so boring, but that’s mostly because instead of fighting the fire, the video is mainly focused on minutiae like making sure the hose is long enough, attaching various parts to allow the water to flow, et cetera. But the action really picks up when, for some reason, one of the fire fighters decides to run deeper into the fire, despite the fact that his teammates, and those of us with half a brain, realize that this is stupid, and really kind of pointless. Someone from the team retrieves the body of one of the other fire fighters and airlifts him to safety, but our protagonist is left behind. Then, sure enough, a tree falls on him.

Cut back home, where the woman somehow found out about the guy, and is crying uncontrollably. A quick change of sweaters and she’s ready to hear the bad news from the other members of the fire fighting team who have arrived outside her door. But suddenly, out of nowhere, the man walks out of the shadows and the couple is reunited.

Ok, if I did a subpar job of explaining that video, I apologize, but I can only work with what they give me. If you think about it for a minute (a few minutes longer than Nickelback likely did), the questions begin to pile up: How the fuck did he get out of the forest fire? If the helicopter came back for him, then his teammates would know he was alive, in which case why did they bother to all go to his wife’s house? Was the last minute of this video, from the phone call to the visit, just some elaborate scheme by the husband to punk his wife into thinking he died? Or did the wife just commit suicide in order to be reunited with her dead husband on the other side? I’m going with that answer, simply based on precedent.

If Everyone Cared (2006)

This song did the impossible: It somehow beat out “Waiting for the World to Change” as the dumbest socially-conscience pop song of the decade. “If Everyone Cared” sounds like a protest song written by people who don’t know what they’re protesting, and don’t really care. And I don’t mean that in the way that Rage Against the Machine’s songs are just sort of vague, generalized anger at “the man;” I mean that Nickelback not only wrote a song that is essentially about nothing, they don’t seem too upset about it. Kind of ironic given the song’s chorus:

If everyone cared and nobody cried
If everyone loved and nobody lied
If everyone shared and swallowed their pride
Then we'd see the day when nobody died

Given that logic, I can only guess how many deaths this song has caused. Listening to Nickelback is painful enough to make you want to cry; they clearly don’t care; oh, and the chorus is a big lie, because the rest of the song is actually about a couple looking at the stars.

I wish I were kidding. I wish they had actually wrote a full on protest song about how mad they are about…uh…death, and that if people just cared enough, nobody would die. Ever. But they didn’t; they wrote a clichéd love song, with a chorus that – despite the apparent belief of the band – never even enters into the same time zone as profound, and they bridge it all together with the flimsy assertion that “If they could love like you and me” then everyone would care and nobody would die.

So instead of any real message or meaning, we get a song that basically says “If George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein could have just loved each other as much as I love my new boyfriend/girlfriend there’d be no need for war.” Shit, I guess those tween girls are still hard at work.

Rockstar (2006)

Here, Nickelback proved they have some range. Tired of simply being the overly macho conduits of tween girl poetry, the guys set out to prove they could sing tween boys’ poetry, too. Of course, they maintained the complete lack of any self-awareness that is the band’s calling card, by making their 18th single all about what they would do if they were big rock stars. So what would Nickelback do if they were big rock stars? The sort of stuff that any tween boy would want to do: go to the Playboy mansion, hire a bodyguard to beat people up, drive 15 cars, and…uh…play baseball in the bathroom.

I don’t want to dwell on how much this song sounds like it was written for a 12-year-old boy’s poetry class, but it really, really does. Of course there’s the over-the-top braggadocio, but there’s also the really in-your-face sexuality. This is a song is determined that you know it likes chicks. That’s why it talks about centerfolds, joining the mile-high club and getting a star on Hollywood Boulevard somewhere between Cher and James Dean…

Wait a minute, how did those two gay icons get into this tribute to man stuff? For that matter, why does the male narrator talk about cutting his hair to become famous? Male rock stars grow their hair, not cut it. And come to think of it, the song doesn’t actually talk about boning the centerfold; it talks about dating her so they can go shopping. Ok, moving on…

Savin’ Me (2006)

Nickelback - "Savin' Me" Video

NICKELBACK | MySpace Music Videos
Where the fuck did this come from? How did guys who sang “I like your pants around your feet” and “You look so much better with something in your mouth” turn out a Christian rock song? “Savin’ Me” carries all the hallmarks of a Christian rock song that is trying hard to keep its mainstream appeal: the imprisonment metaphor, the feeling of being lost and broken, and calling out for a savior to redeem you. These lyrics are too overt for Switchfoot. Even taking this as a religious song, the imagery is lazy.

But as usual, Nickelback manages to distract us from their tired sound and awful lyrics by making an even stupider video. What’s worse, they’ve moved from ripping off “The Sixth Sense” to ripping off a much worse movie, “Final Destination.” Both play off the same “when you cheat death, you can see death’s plan” crap, accept “Savin’ Me” takes it a step further and turns it into a game of tag. When someone pulls you out of the way of a speeding truck of falling industrial equipment, you gain the ability to see how long everyone has left to live.

I want to go on record here, in stating that this video is totally unrealistic. These people gain the ability to tell how long someone has left to live simply by looking at them? And they don’t try to parlay this into a new age money-making scheme? Fuck, if these assholes can get major TV deals, the people in this video should at least be able to get regular gigs at small-market casinos.

Anyway, as soon as you save someone, you pass off the ability to them, and leave them to wander the streets aimlessly until they can stop the next untimely (or is it timely?) death. If, like these people, you live in a city where three people on the same city block die every other minute, you can rid yourself of this power rather quickly.

By the way, if you can not laugh when the old lady’s high school drama club-worthy death coincides perfectly with the end of the guitar solo, you’re a better person than I.

If Today Was Your Last Day (2008)

A lot of singers have poor grammar. I’ve come to accept that, and most of the time I don’t complain. But when you base an entire song around that same misuse of the English language, I won’t let that go.

The line “If today was your last day” is speculation and speculation calls for the subjunctive tense of the verb “to be” which is “were.” Suppose in the in process of writing her latest album, someone asked the Beyonce, “Hey, what do you think it would be like to be a boy?” If, in fact, she had once been a boy, she could reply, “When I was a boy, I put myself first and made the rules as I went.” I would have no problem with this, because it is grammatically correct and I believe that transgendered people are deserving of the same respect as everyone else. But Beyonce isn’t a boy, she never has been, and given the success her feminine physique has given her, and the fact that she is well past the age of majority, she is never going to be a boy. So the sentence calls for the subjunctive, “If I were a boy…”

Here’s a simple way to remember the subjunctive: Chad Kroeger could say “If I were a good songwriter I wouldn’t suck so hard” and that would be grammatically correct, because he’s not a good songwriter and he’s never going to be a good songwriter. It’s purely hypothetical.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s get into this awful wannabe country song, “If Today Was Your Last Day.” Every line in this song is a different motivational quote. It’s one “carpe diem” away from the “Dead Poets Society” script. The whole song sort of feels like the football player in Logic 101 trying to philosophize. The writer was trying so hard to be profound, but ended up making Heidi Montag look thoughtful.

Then there’s that line “Leave old pictures in the past.” God I wish they had...

Photograph (2005)

There’s not much worse in life than this song. Failure, the pain of rejection, scabies; they all pale in comparison. It probably helps that most of these themes are the subject of this losers’ anthem. Give Nickelback credit, however; there’s a lot of pain in these lyrics, and Kroeger really helps you feel it to the point where you worry he’s going to have a hemorrhoid by the end of the song.

Every now and then you have to stop and appreciate the fact that Chad Kroeger is actually a singer. Think about that for a second; Chad Kroeger, who sings like he’s trying to kick the song’s ass, could claim the same profession as Frank Sinatra. You’re reminded of just how bizarre this is early and often in “Photograph,” and Kroeger looks straight into the camera and melodically bellows: “Look at this photograph.” In case you didn’t get it, he holds up a photograph.

The fourth line really demonstrates Nickelback’s lyrical prowess: “What the hell is on Joey’s head.” That’s when you realize it’s going to be one of those songs, where the singer just narrates everything he sees, as he sees it. And the fact that it’s rhymed with “How did our eyes get so red” really makes you question how the first verse of your song could possibly contain two throwaway lines. Normally, Nickelback songs can at least hold it together until the second verse, or at least the chorus. Frankly, it’s pretty hard to get past this point. It’s like your ears have stumbled across a barren wasteland, and you realize that going any further is kind of a useless, because nothing ahead of you could possibly sustain life. But we push on, because this is Movies Schmovies damn it. I made it through Vampires vs. Zombies, I made it through Shatter Dead, I made it through Antichrist, I made it through something like 400 Black Eyed Peas videos, and I'll make it through this too.

Somewhere in the third verse we figure out that the narrator is a high school dropout. That might make me a prick for pointing out that this song, also, fails to grasp the subjunctive tense (“If I was them I wouldn’t let me in”), as well as the fact that the narrator assumes his criminal record would contain trespassing offenses committed as a minor (“Criminal record says I broke in twice”). His juvenile record would be closed, assuming the narrator is over 18 (god I hope so).

In spite of the narrator sounding like he’s reflecting on his third tour in ‘Nam, this song actually doesn’t tell us a lot about the character. What photograph is he looking for and why? Do his memories of high school make him happy or sad? With Kroeger’s voice it’s kind of hard to tell. And perhaps most importantly, how does a song about a 20-something loser’s reflections on his fairly mundane high school experience appeal to Nickelback’s teenage audience? I haven’t the slightest clue; all I know is that you can hear this song on Kidz Bop. I guess even in elementary school, kids look forward to the mawkish reflections they will someday be able to have as of yet to be had on their high school years, whereas all I can think while I’m listening to this song is the likelihood that I went to school with people like this, and they’re hanging around somewhere in the Chicaogland area looking at old pictures and muttering “What the hell is on Jon’s head?” This song is why I’m never going to a reunion.

* * *

So, by now you probably feeling like you’ve survived the trials of Hercules, but I haven’t told you the half of it yet. Nickelback will not be satisfied until it has unmade everything that is good and holy about our society. Just look at their name: Nickelback. And what’s on the back of the nickel? Monticello. Sounds awfully Italian to me. But what’s to fear about Italians, you ask? Oh, nothing. Except maybe for that guy Mussolini, and that socialist porn star in their government.

Now I know you’re all rushing to grab a nickel because I can’t possibly be right about all of this, so once you see that I’m not pulling your chain, flip that coin over and see what’s on the front: Thomas Jefferson, our god-fearing philosopher-president, without whom we’d still be sieg heiling George III. And Nickelback wants him facing down. So why are these Canadians asking us to cover up our founding fathers in favor of Italian Nazi socialism? I don’t claim to know all the answers; I’m just a guy asking questions.

Music Schmusic: Worst Decade Ever Pt. 8

2010-01-14T21:22:00.000-08:00

I got a feeling that tonight’s gonna be a…grating and painful exercise in self-flagellation.

Tonight, we explore a band that is continually one-upping itself in a sadistic effort to suck harder. A band whose truly prolific output of jaw-droppingly awful solo and collaborative efforts goes beyond the bounds reason, human decency and even the English language to stupefy you with its inanity. I feel like I’m presenting them a lifetime achievement award, and they’ve been active for less than ten years. I’m talking, of course, about the Black Eyed Peas, and their pursuit to record the worst song of the 2000s. We’re going to look at seven strong contenders, but first let’s meet the Peas themselves:

will.i.am, the guy from “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”

Fergie, the chick from “Grindhouse”

Taboo, the guy who played Vega in the “Street Fighter” movie

And uh, Boba Fett.

Black Eyed Peas -- Let’s Get Retarded (2003)

Topping the list of the Peas’ musical crimes against humanity is this charming song about drinking so much that people mistake you for Michael Rapaport. It all starts with one of the best outlandish boasts in hip hop: “When I bust my rhyme, you break your necks.” Ok, so my necks are intact for now, but I’m still pretty sure one of these songs is going to give me meningitis.

The other lyrical joys of this song include lines like “Let’s get cuckoo,” “Let’s get ig’nt” and “Bob your head like epilepsy.” It should be noted that of these descriptions, each presented as an example of how to dance so people think you’re retarded, not one is synonymous with “retarded.” The lyrics may as well be “Let’s get sleepy/Let’s get Cotard syndrome/Let’s get manicures in here!”

Fergie, perhaps feeling underutilized on this track, shows off her mad spelling bee skills by teaching us how to spell “retarded” at the end of the song. At least she spelled it right. More on (pun intended) this later.

Black Eyed Peas -- My Humps (2005)

Inane, repetitive lyrics? Check.

Irritating musical hook? Check.

Warped view of sexuality? Check.

Overloaded with catchphrases? Check.

The last four minutes of “Layla” tacked onto the end? Pretty close.

My god, it’s the perfect storm of crap.

You may be thinking “Oh, come on; it’s no ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ but it’s fun.” Well, consider this: One day, a research scientist may suddenly be struck with a new method for curing all known disease. He’ll be scrambling to commit the thought to paper; he pauses for a moment to collect his thoughts, and is horrified to realize that he can’t recall what was potentially the greatest discovery in human history. His “eureka” moment has been completely replaced by a new thought: “What’cha gonna do with all that junk? All that junk inside that trunk?” Thanks, Black Eyed Peas; there goes the cure for lovely lady lump cancer.

Now there are a lot of bad songs about tits and ass, but most of them have the decency to not discuss them in first grade playground code. The Peas even go further, and make up their own euphemisms (more on that later, too) like “mix your milk with my cocoa puff.” Yeah, I don’t think I want to know.

Then again, when they get literal, it’s no better. “They say I’m really sexy/the boys they want to sex me.” There is only one proper way to use ‘sex’ as a verb, and that is the method for determining whether a newborn chicken is a cockerel of a pullet, before you sell them at market (don’t ask me how I know this; I’m not sure myself). I’m just going to assume that’s what Fergie is talking about here, otherwise the combination of the Peas’ awkward, childish euphemisms combined with Fergie’s creepy childish singing voice just takes this song places that no one wants to go…too late; I’m there.

Fergie -- London Bridge (2006)

Why is there an air raid siren? Why are those really tough-sounding guys so frightened? Oh, no. Fergie made a solo album. But we’all ain’t ready for this; Fergie says so herself right at the beginning. It’s been four years, and apparently we’re still not ready, because no one has a god damned clue what the chorus means. What is “my London Bridge?” Why is it falling down? Can we still try to build it up with wood and clay?

When you coin your own euphemism, the meaning has to be obvious. In 2002, Missy Elliot became the first person to throw the term “badonk-a-donk-donk” into a song. Even though the term was foreign to most of her listeners, everyone knew she was describing her ass, because the rest of the verse was talking about her ass. That’s context. When the euphemism is all there is to the song, there is no context. You just assume it’s about fucking, because...well, most of Fergie’s songs are. But Fergie and company seem to have made up a euphemism just for the hell of it. They give no indication that they even know what “London Bridge” is supposed to mean; it’s simply there to make listeners think they are hearing some forbidden carnal knowledge.

It’s time we take the mystery out of it, and give “London Bridge” a definition consistent with the overall feel of the song: “London Bridge,” is a variation of contract bridge played primarily in England, in which the loser of each hand must remove an article of clothing. It has gain popularity as a long, boring way for old people to get each other naked.

I think that image captures it.

Fergie feat. will.i.am – Fergalicious (2007)

If you haven’t noticed, will.i.am and Fergie share a love of the written word. Ok, so actually it appears more likely that they have a grudge against the written word. In that case, they know their enemy well, as so many of their collaborations show the tell-tale signs of an uncredited co-writer in the form of an online thesaurus. How else do you explain their use of the word “hectic,” or the fact that parts of “Get Retarded” sound like Microsoft Word’s list of recommended synonyms?

Nowhere is this more apparent than in “Fergalicious,” the second single off Fergie’s debut album “The Dutchess.” (Note the misspelling of “duchess.”) The song opens with an attempt to write the dictionary definition of a word they just made up. “Fergalicious, definition: Make them boy go loco.” Ok, so I never said it was an accurate definition.

“They want my treasures, so they get their pleasures from my photo,” Fergie continues. “Treasures” is hardly a Black Eyed Peas’ euphemism. It’s gentle and understated; plus you can tell what it means. I suspect its inclusion is the end result of will.i.am Googling “What’s a classy way to say pussy hole?”

But even in a song about how Fergie is so delicious that she needed her own adjective to describe it, she is overshadowed by will.i.am who spells it out for us: “T to the A to the S-T-E-Y, girl you taste to the D to the E to the L-I-C-I-O-U-S.” Ok, for starters I really didn’t want to know how Fergie tastes. I already found what she smells like, and that was entirely too much information to begin with. But what the fuck is with the spelling of tasty? It’s not like you’re spelling onomatopoeia and just forgot where the a’s and o’s go. Tasty is a fucking first grade spelling word. I can’t write the name of Fergie or will.i.am without a little red line popping up under it, so you don’t even need to be a really proficient speller. But when a song has countless technicians, producers and studio executives listening to before it ever became a major single, you’d think one of them would tell them, “hey retard, you put an e in tasty.” Same goes for the designers, editors, printers and the of course ht studio executives again who signed off on “The Dutchess.”

The spelling on this album suffers from a serious systemic problem, or widespread apathy. Huh. Kind of explains the music, too.

will.i.am – I Got It From My Mama (2007)

Baby, where’d you get your understanding of genetics from? Apparently will.i.am has never seen a Punnett square, because “if a girl’s real sexy nine times out of ten she’s sexy like her mama” is not a sound genetic hypothesis. Even if we are very generous and assume that the traits will.i.am lists – sexiness, prettiness, fineness, hotness, etc. – are heritable by genes in a simple dominance pattern, the math just doesn't work. If the mother is heterozygous for each of these traits, then the best you could hope for is five times out of ten, or fifty percent. If, for instance, "sexy" is a recessive trait, then the girl's mother would have to be homozygous recessive just to have the "sexy" phenotype; the girl's father would have to be heterozygous or homozygous if she has any hope of expressing those genes, and in that case the probabilities are either fifty percent or one hundred percent. If "sexy" is a dominant trait and the mother is homozygous dominant, then the girl would (statistically) be hot ten times out of ten, and will.i.am is unnecessarily hedging his bets. Of course, this is all ignoring the complications that sex-linkage, incomplete dominance, codominance, polygenic traits, epigenetic factors, and environmental factors would introduce, but even in the simplest of situations, willi.iam is completely off-base with his calculations. Ok, so the guy doesn’t know how to fucking spell, I admit we’re not dealing with Gregor Mendel here. Maybe this will help:

You see will, you don’t get all your traits from just one ancestor. You, for instance, are a little bit like Flava Flav, and a little bit like Biz Markie. That’s what makes you so special!

will.i.am should probably have the opportunity to demonstrate that his findings could be duplicated, but I don’t really want to hear the song again.

Black Eyed Peas -- Boom Boom Pow (2008)

If you haven’t noticed yet, the Peas are drawn to really simple rhyme schemes the way the Beastie Boys are drawn to really simple rhyme schemes. But even the guys who gave us lines like “My name is Ad-Rock and I’m a Scorpio/Don’t ask me ‘cause I just don’t know,” stuck to the English language, which is really all it takes to earn more respect than the Black Eyed Pea’s “Boom Boom Pow.” Most of the words in this song aren’t words at all. The ones that are have been arranged with other words, in such a way so as to make them essentially meaningless. So you want to get the line “I’m on that HD flat” into the song (and trust me, you do) but it doesn’t rhyme with “This beat go boom boom pow?” Change that line to “Boom boom bap.” Simple as that.

Even LFO’s “Summer Girls” isn’t that lazy. Its lines are complete non sequiturs but “Fell deep in love but now we ain’t speakin’/Michael J. Fox was Alex P. Keaton” is made up of actual words, in an order that literate people can comprehend. Seriously, Black Eyed Peas; “y’all getting hit with the boom boom?” What the fuck?

Black Eyed Peas -- Meet Me Halfway (2009)

Until this point, I actually believed that the Peas were trying to make each song worse than the last. They were sort of like a musical Roger Corman, and as bad as some of the songs listed above were, at least part of you could feel like they were laughing with you. That changed when “Meet Me Halfway” hit the airwaves (and by ‘hit the airwaves’ I mean ‘was in that DirecTV commercial’).

This song is bad, and I don’t mean that in “My Humps” sort of way. This one is really bad. For starters, it’s based around a metaphor taken so literally as to make it nonsensical. “Meet me halfway” is a pretty familiar metaphor, and sounds like a good title for a song about compromise in relationships. Until Fergie starts giving you fucking directions.

“Can you meet me halfway?/Right up the borderline that’s where I’m going to wait for you…I can’t go any further than this.”

It’s like she’s traveling to meet a guy but her car ran out of gas or something. This song brings us back to the Black Eyed Peas’ childish lyrics, because she’s like a kid who can’t cross the street. Bizarrely enough, there’s no real indication in the song that even recognizes “meet me halfway” as a metaphor. Fergie sings her piece about how if she crosses the invisible fence in the front yard her shock collar will go off, and will.i.am sings some shit about space travel.

The problem with this song is that it’s the only Black Eyed Peas it’s not trying to be dumb, and it’s still a piece of shit. There’s no juvenile hook and some of the lyrics actually try to be heartfelt; they’re trying to record a good song. But they aren’t trying very hard, so we end up with a song that not contains a bridge acknowledging that it’s time to sing the bridge, they make the bridge a pun about crossing a bridge to the other side of the song. Are things better on the other side? No, it’s exactly the fucking same.

I could go on and on. I haven't even touched on "Pump It," "Shut Up," "Beep," "Clumsy," "I Got A Feeling'" or that music video Boba Fett made, but I should probably go see a doctor about some broken necks.

UnbELIevable

2010-01-14T18:04:00.000-08:00

If you've been to movies recently, you've probably seen the trailers for the upcoming film "Book of Eli," where Denzel Washington plays a kung-fu monk walking across the post-apocalyptic wasteland with a copy of the Bible that Gary Oldman's character wants to use as a weapon...somehow.

I was actually optimistic about the movie when I saw trailers that played coy about what the book was. I mean, a plot that focuses on a book as some kind of all-important weapon-thing is totally primed to be a preachy "Bible is Awesome!" message, which also makes it a perfect twist to have the book be something--anything!--else. I suppose it's a better setup for a "Twilight Zone" episode than a movie, really, but all that focus on a book that some revere and others want to use for evil would be great fodder for a twist where the book turned out to be "Utopia" or "The Republic" or the U.S. Constitution or the Collected Works of Shakespeare or a book by Galen or Hippocrates or Pasteur or Salk or Gray's "Anatomy" or any number of books that would be worthy of such focus thanks to their utility--and would do what post-apocalyptic stories are meant to do: comment on modern society.

Instead, the filmmakers have apparently taken a route that makes almost no sense, by playing the whole thing straight with the Bible. I don't know about anyone else, but if I were struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, I'd be much more interested in "Survivalism for Dummies."

All this would be somewhat forgivable if the filmmakers were trying to present some sincere message on the nature of society or faith or religion or humanity or something, but apparently they haven't put that much thought into it. Seriously, take a look at this hilarious, enlightening interview with the directors. It's a thing of beauty. Some highlights:

Q: I'm just curious. For you, why was it more important to have a character carrying a book with a message of spirituality, versus a message of "This is how you purify water?"

Albert: I would say it's the same thing nowadays. Why is it important that people are holding that book in such high regard, or thinking that it should be spoken from, or told to others as opposed to building a church talking about irrigation? You can pose that question to anybody in any time period, post-apocalypse or now, about any religious text, or any text of any sort. "Oh, it's more important to survive. We need food. So why not build churches about survival and food?"

You shouldn't have to explain anything — poetry, art on the wall, a movie, whatever it is. You shouldn't have to explain yourself. But here I am, being a hypocrite.

Q: I read an interview with you guys in Maxim, where it mentioned that a lot of audience members might think that this is Mad Max meets The Passion of Christ, and that that is a wrong assumption to make. Why?

Allen: Yeah I don't think that [describes] the movie at all. I don't believe you can even make comparisons. First of all, Passion of the Christ is an anomaly, it's a one all. That will never happen again. That was a situation that no one ever would have foresaw. I don't think you can compare any movie to that movie. Whether you loved it or it wasn't your cup of tea. As far as Mad Max, I prefer Road Warrior. Our movie has a bit of Road Warrior in it.

And my personal favorite:

Q: If religion didn't help the people of Eli's fictional past, why do you guys as filmmakers think it will help their future?

Albert: You have some very deep, profound psychological questions there! You're applying logic to something that there is no logic in. That's part of my struggle. If you apply logic to a faith based religion — any of them — it will slowly start to fall apart. If you apply logic to Star Wars or Lord of The Rings, it will slowly start to fall apart. But if you go into it as a movie experience, as entertainment, [as] a mythology, and you don't look for the holes, and you go and believe then that's a different experience.

It's not often that you see a filmmaker outright stating that the movie falls apart if you examine the plot with logic. I have to hand it to interviewer Meredith Woerner for asking all the right questions--with follow-ups, even!--and getting the most laughably inept, inane, and incomprehensible answers from the directors. Go read the whole thing; it's a gold mine.

As to "Book of Eli," I'm actually looking forward to seeing it even more, but I'm now fully expecting it to be a Schmovie.

Music Schmusic: Worst Decade Ever Pt. 7

2010-01-12T20:42:00.000-08:00

If I had started this list two years ago, there’s no question that this post would be solely devoted to Paris Hilton’s “Stars are Blind.” Let that run through your mind for a minute: Paris Hilton’s reggae song got bumped. What the fuck happened? I mean, at one point Paris actually sings, “Now tell me who have you been dreaming of?/I and I alone.”

So why can’t a rich white girls’ saccharine tribute to her oneness with Jah make the list? Because in 2008, a great, whiter hope emerged.

Heidi Montag – Higher (2008)

Let’s get this out of the way right up front, because there’s a reason why you have to sift through countless parodies just to find the music video on YouTube. The actual video even looks like a parody video. Heidi moves like a Huntington’s choreia patient, she looks like she learned to dance from a strip aerobics video and when she sings…Ho. Lee. Shit. What started out looking like a coma-induced flashback sequence from someone’s student film takes on a distinct “I filmed my music video at the mall” feel as soon as soon as she starts lip synching.

Maybe it’s the inevitable consequence of having a 90-pound blonde in a bikini miming Luciano Pavarotti, or maybe it’s the continual feel that at any minute this could turn into a celebrity sex tape; but for whatever reason this video is hysterical, and totally deserving of every critical word ever spoken, written, thought or made up out of a random jumble of sounds.

But much of the criticism stops at the video. That’s a shame because the song itself is a real shitshow too. The song begins, inexplicably, with some heavy duty electric noise like Heidi is trying to resurrect the Frankenstein monster. Then we head a synthesizer solo, performed either by Heidi herself, by her husband Spencer, or a blind chicken.

Then we get the first lyrics of the song:

“Here I go now/I’m keeping my eyes open/don't you let me down. /Nothing can stop me now/I know you hear this sound./ Go ahead and let it out/don’t be afraid to fly, fly high/reaches past the sky.”

What the fuck is she trying to say here? This isn’t a coherent thought; it’s a clusterfuck of platitudes. It’s like someone wrote a song based on Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric. The word salad continues:

“Feel the wind on your face/we can frolic or race/we can go at your pace (pace)/the power lifted me/so it set me free.”

Yes, she used the word frolic in a pop song. You can also see the reoccurring theme of liberation, which according to Heidi is about not listening to what other people think, and freeing yourself to do what you want to do. That’s a fine message – and a shitty pop song is a fairly ironic medium for it – but I can’t help but wonder if she takes it a little too far.

“It's like I've been released/there's no chains holdin' me/cause now I finally found the key/let me open the door for you.”

What? You didn't know "Higher" was a black spiritual? Just wait until her next single, "Swing Low, Sweet Escalade." Suddenly Paris Hilton as a Rastafarian seems less of a stretch.

But none of that can top the chorus. Amid reminders that she's only going higher, Heidi drops the deep thought "I dream and that's a fact." No, let me correct that. She drops that deep thought four times. This begs the question: Was her ability to dream ever in doubt? Is she calling out someone who claimed that she lacked the ability to dream? Or perhaps this is a diss track against people without the capacity for long-term planning. Actually, the far more likely scenario is that she stole all her lyrics off inspirational posters of hot air balloons and children of different races holding hands.

Come to think of it, Heidi, if this is where your dreams have got us, maybe you'd best quit that, too.

Music Schmusic: Worst Decade Ever Pt. 6

2010-01-11T23:59:00.000-08:00

“Reeeemix…”

Every now and then, you’ll hear a song you recognize, only to be interrupted by that unfamiliar voice. It sounds like a civil alert siren, because it is. The bombings intensified during the 2000s. Lives were lost. Will we ever learn?

Fergie -- Big Girls Don't Cry (Sean Kingston remix)

Why the original sucks: Any song that starts with Fergie crooning “the smell of your skin lingers on me” goes from zero to vomit awfully damn quickly. The reoccurring childish imagery scattered in a song about breaking up with a fuck buddy is pretty disturbing throughout, but nowhere is it worse than when Fergie compares herself to “a little school maid in the school yard.” Suddenly I’m picturing an aging meth addict in a little bo peep costume from Fredericks of Hollywood. Ewwww.

How it got worse: Is it possible to remix a song without actually hearing the original? Sean Kingston sure tried. Because Fergie’s appeals about moving on and growing up are met with stock R&B love song lines like “I’m feeling blue/let’s work things out.” But the worst part of the remix comes when Kingston follows up some of Fergie’s really serious, emotional lines by repeating in his Rasta Muppet voice, because it doesn’t really sound like he’s singing with her. It sounds like he’s making fun of her. Actually, scratch that. That’s a great thing, because it makes me feel like someone hates this awful song as much as I do, and made a horrible remix of it simply to shame her.

Linkin Park -- Enth E Nd (End the End remix, featuring Kutmasta Kurt and Motion Man)

Why the original sucks: The recipe for Linkin Park’s “In the End” is as follows:

1) One part the worst All American Reject song you could ever imagine

2) Mix in one part Moby

3) Water down heavily

4) Bake for three and a half minutes in an angry white boy bowl

5) Add the rapper from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ “Cowabunga” to taste

How it got worse: In 2002, Linkin Park's "Reanimation" introduced some new versions of the same old shit, mixing their Nu Metal with electronica. (That feeling you're experiencing right now is in all likelihood that of your spinal cord dissolving.) Kutmasta Kurt and Motion Man can be commended for making this song sound less like it comes off an early 90s demo tape, but it’s all a cruel joke building up to the realization that once you strip away a lot of the background noise, you can actually hear Mike Shinoda rap.

Avril Lavine -- Girlfriend (Li'l Mama remix)

Why the original sucks: Let’s keep this one simple. This song sucks because the refrain is “Hey, hey, you, you, I don’t like your girlfriend. Hey, hey, you, you, I think you need a new one. Hey, hey, you, you, I can be your girlfriend.” That’s even worse than the awful 1970s Beach Boys knock off she stole it from.

How it got worse: The inane hook is driven home by adding “nope,” “yup” and “Li’l Mama be your girlfriend” after each line, but at least most of Avril’s other lyrics are gone. And somewhere after her line “I’ve been doing this since ‘Hop on Pop,’” I’m pretty sure she compares herself to The Notorious B.I.G. So to avoid any confusion:

“Sometimes your words just hypnotize me.”

“My lip gloss be poppin’”

Rihanna -- Umbrella (Chris Brown remix)

Why the original sucks: McCartney’s Law: Nonsense syllables make for the catchiest lyrics. “Umbrella” is exhibit A. It’s probably the catchiest hook of the decade, but only because 80 percent of the song consists simply of “ella” and “eh.” The words that are in English are little better. Two people are shielded from the tempests of life by their love, represented by an umbrella. Sound familiar? Could someone just once write a catchy pop chorus that actually says something of substance? How about this:

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity

May have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention

Than either the power of ideas

Or the errors of autocracy.

Throw some synthesizers over that; kick in a drum machine. You can even add some “do do dos” at the end to help the radio play. Top 40 potential, perhaps?

But a lousy chorus may be forgivable if Rihanna didn’t sound like a fucking harpy singing it. It’s like she’s trying to give me a migraine.

How it got worse: Ironically, it’s Chris Brown’s attempt to inject some originality into the chorus only makes things worse. When it was just “Umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh” the monotony became almost hypnotic, but when Brown changes “Umbrella” to “Cinderella” your minds is suddenly free to explore millions of other awful ideas.

“I would like my cheeseburger with mozzarella, ella, ella, eh, eh.”

“Ray Liotta rocks the shit in ‘Goodfellas’ ella, ella, eh, eh.”

“‘Twilight’ is a novel about Ed and Bella, ella, ella, eh, eh.”

“Don’t eat that raw chicken you’ll get salmonella, ella, ella, eh, eh.”

“Where is Crete? It’s near the Gulf of Mirabella, ella, ella, eh, eh.”

“Carmen Sandiego’s band was Rockapella, ella, ella, eh, eh.”

It’s hard to believe that Chris Brown actually thought he had anything to add to this song. He isn’t really remaining the song like Li’l Mama is trying to do; he isn’t really trying to turn the song into a two-sided conversation like Sean Kingston tries to do (and fails miserably). Judging by the output, I can only guess that Chris Brown is deeply competitive, and he once overheard someone saying how whiney and annoying Rihanna sounds, and he went to work, singing for hours into his vocoder until he could finally top her, and, just to prove it to the world, he released this remix.

This is, without a doubt, the worst thing Chris Brown has ever done to Rihanna.

Music Schmusic: Worst Decade Ever Pt. 5

2010-01-09T22:40:00.000-08:00

You can't run from it. It will find you.

I was going to take this weekend off, I had tickets to the Bulls game and everything; I was going to ignore shitty music. But the shit just follows me. Five minutes into the game, the couple with the seats in front of me wanders in. Going to the game was clearly her idea, because while she snapped pictures of the players and halftime entertainment, he read -- I am not making this up -- "The Catcher in the Rye." He continued to indulge his rather ironic choice in literature until sometime in the third quarter when his cell phone rang. I recognized the song; I had been waffling as to whether or not to include it on the list. Guess what, it made it.

Simple Plan -- Perfect (2002)

The album was called "No Pads, No Helmets...Just Balls." Now that's a title that prepares you for some pure punk rock badassery. Move over, "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols." And the cover art? It's like they boiled down "The Hangover" into one image of freebased awesome. Sure, they all have the same expression, but look at that one in the red; he's going to probably going to bang the bride right in the middle of the bachelorette party. And is he even going to think twice about her groom's feelings? Only if laughing out loud when he thinks he notices a slightly queasy look on his face when the happy couple shares their first kiss as husband and wife counts. These guys are going to rock!

Can you say "bait and switch?" Instead of the tour de force of force of punk rock forecast by the album cover, we get the cutter's anthem "Perfect." Songwriters take note, it may be impossible to squeeze more angst into a four and a half minute song without drawing little frowny faces on the drums. Listening to lyrics like "I just want to make you proud/I'm never gonna be good enough for you" over three chords played really loud makes you feel like you're stuck at the world's worst family dinner while the garage band next door rehearses for that weekend's battle of the bands.

This is the kind of song that should have never even made it to rehearsal. No grown man needs to be whining about a father who is somehow both absentee and overbearing, and they certainly shouldn't be trying to pass it off as punk rock.

Like I said, I waffled about putting this song on the list. Lead singer Pierre Bouvier (I shit you not) manages to make DeadJournal-worthy lyrics sound even more pathetic than they would sound at your local poetry slam, but is being remarkably whiney enough? So I put it to a test. As it would so happen, "Perfect" is more or less a musical carbon copy of Creed's "Higher." I listened to "Higher;" then I listened to it again. And again. And a fourth time. If you make Creed sound good, you belong here.

Music Schmusic: Worst Decade Ever Pt. 4

2010-01-07T20:48:00.000-08:00

Hear that? That’s the sound of hip hop dying.
Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em – Crank That (Soulja Boy) (2007)

There are lyrics, and then there are lyrics. Take Sean Kingston’s 2007 hit “Beautiful Girls,” for example. (By the way, Kingston, I loved your collaboration with Sisqo) There’s a line in the chorus that sounds for all the world like “All these beautiful girls/they only want to do the durb.” It sounds incredibly dirty and hilarious, but eventually you come across the real lyrics and see that he’s actually saying “do you dirt” which unfortunately can’t measure up to the awesome line you hoped it was.

Then you listen to a song like “Crank That” which would succeed “Beautiful Girls” at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 later that same year. There’s this line in “Crank That” that is totally incomprehensible, and all you can make from it, even after listening to it again and again and again, is “I got me some bathin’ apes.” How did anyone come up with a phrase like that? What, if anything, does it mean? Is it ok for white people to repeat in front of black people? Who the fuck knows? Part of you doesn’t even want to think about it too much, for fear that it will drive you insane, and you’ll be reduced to a Dickenson hobo, staggering around town with a three-foot beard and pigeons nesting in it, dressed only in an overcoat covered in five different kinds of shit, grabbing young women at random and shouting at them “I got me some bathin’ apes.” But the part of your mind that demands reason and consistency keeps pushing you to figure out some meaning, until the inside of your head starts to look like John Nash’s tool shed.

Then you finally hear Soulja Boy’s full album – souljaboytellem.com – and you realize, not only is the line actually “I got me some bathin’ apes,” but Soulja Boy has recorded another song, entirely built around that line. Both sides of your mind start going crazy in their own special way, but they can agree on one thing: It’s time to kill yourself.

Understand, “Crank That” isn’t just one of the worst songs ever. It’s one of the worst songs ever, which directly inspired at least three other songs on Soulja Boy’s appalling debut album. And lest you think it’s just the album that is bad, you can listen to his follow up – iSouljaboytellem – and realize that Soulja Boy is, in fact, the worst thing to happen to music. Ever.

As “Crank That” was the debut of the Soulja Boy dance, there of course had to be a sequel song, “Soulja Girl.” Then, because Soulja Boy thought he was such a clever wordsmith, he added the song “Bapes” where he simply shouts “I got me some bathin’ apes” over and over. He must have also felt that the “Crank That” line “I pass it to Arab” deserved its own four minute loop, because the album also includes a song answering to that description, aptly titled “Pass it to Arab.”

Imagine you sit down at a blackjack table, next to a person who is clearly mentally retarded. I’m not being facetious; we’re talking helmet and all. The deal comes, and the retarded person gets two kings against the dealer’s ten. The player splits his kings. “That will never work,” you might be heard to remark. “Everyone knows you don’t split your tens, especially when the dealer has a ten up.” But the cards come; two more tens. What does he do? He splits those too. “Now he’s going to get it,” you say. And he sure does, four aces come down, and he lands blackjack on all four hands. The retarded player looks at you and asks, “Whose retarded now?” That’s just about the best way I can describe Soulja Boy. Everything about the asshole screams “failure;” his songs strive to be irritating, his lyrics are at best meaningless and at worst completely incoherent, the quality of his sound and video production is so poor that it must be intentional, and he looks like he just stepped out of fucking Kris Kross. All this, and yet he’s remarkably popular.

How popular is he? So popular that old ladies are doing his dance on YouTube. Do they know what “Superman that hoe” means? How about “Super Soak that bitch?” I’ve got one good guess... Ok, time to kill myself.

Music Schmusic: Worst Decade Ever Pt. 3

2010-01-06T21:04:00.000-08:00

Ok, partner. You know what time it is.

Limp Bizkit – Rollin’ (2000)

The 2000s saw the rise of Nu Metal, also known as rapcore, also known as atonal shit that sodomizes your ears. Its troubadours were a bunch of doughy white guys from Florida, known as Limp Bizkit.

It’s hard to find a song that exudes more utter contempt for its listeners than “Rollin,’” the second single off Limp’s 2000 release – come on, do I really have to write this? Fuck my life – “Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water.” (Chocolate Starfish, by the way, is used interchangeably throughout various songs on the album as both a euphemism for the anus, and a nickname for lead yeller Fred Durst. I’m sure this is not a coincidence.) This song sounds like it wants to kick your ass, but the tough-guy exterior and ‘roid rage induced threats can’t hide the fact that it’s basically the Hokey Pokey:

"Move in now move out/Hands up now hands down/Back up back up/
Tell me what you're gonna do now/Keep rollin' rollin' rollin' rollin’"

Fred Durst makes DJ Casper look like Jackson Browne. One listen to “Rollin’” and suddenly Ice Cube’s “You Can Do It (Put Your Back Into It)” sounds divinely inspired.

Ok, I’m going to say something you’ll probably never see on this site again: This is a waste of my time. “Rollin’” is not only one of the worst songs of the 2000s, it’s a strong competitor for the worst thing of the 2000s. Fuck, the video for this was filmed in the fall of 2000 at the World Trade Center, and that’s still the worst day in the history of Lower Manhattan. To fully articulate what a chode Fred Durst is, and the sheer inanity of a song with lyrics like “One two three time zoom to the 6/Jonesin’ for you picks of the Limp Bizkit mix” would only be transcribing the rage already boiling over in the mind of any conscience person unfortunate enough to hear “Rollin.’”

Here’s my suggestion. Play the video again, but this time mute it. Without the song raping your soul, you realize that watching Durst dance around like an Adderall-fueled spider monkey is fucking hilarious. I mean the guy does a jig, he steals disco moves from “Saturday Night Fever” and he throws a punch like a 5-year-old girl. It’s kind of what I imagine the Humpty Hump would look like, if it were being performed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But we can’t discount the song entirely, or we’d miss Durst’s lyrical gem “shut the fuck up and back the fuck up while I fuck this track up.” Couldn’t have written it better myself.

Music Schmusic: Worst Decade Ever Pt. 2

2010-01-05T17:31:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the second circle of our Dante-esque musical journey through the worst decade ever. The second circle of Dante’s hell is where the lustful are punished, so it’s only fitting that the second installment in our series do the same. But fear not; an angel approaches:

Hinder -- Lips of an Angel (2006)

Fuck.

In 2006, Hinder gave us this feeble attempt at the most stomach-turning ode to the love triangle since David Crosby’s “Triad.” It climbed to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, and lifted their year-old album “Extreme Behavior” to platinum status. Wait “Extreme Behavior?” Not “Mundane Conversation” or “Ornery Whining?”

Anyway, in “Lips of an Angel” Hinder’s singer Austin Winkler – yes, honest to god, his name is Austin Winkler – belches out one end of a phone conversation with an ex-girlfriend, while his unsuspecting cuckquean girlfriend poses and rubs herself in the background. In case lyrics like “My girl’s in the next room/sometimes I wish she was you/I guess we never really moved on,” didn’t get the message across, the video pretty much spells it out. Winkler on the phone, his girlfriend – as might be expected – is in the next room, and just in case you still don’t get it, Winkler pulls a picture of his ex from under the thin pile of papers on his desk. The fact that he keeps a picture of his ex-girlfriend under his notebook of lyrics and that day’s mail makes the statement “I guess we never really moved on” a huge understatement, but also begs the question of why he’s still treating this like some big fucking secret. Either the girl already knows, and doesn’t care, or she can unknowingly share a studio apartment with a guy who keeps a picture of his ex-girlfriend within arm’s reach, in which case she’s so fucking stupid that he could sing “and yes, I’ve dreamt of you too,” at the top of his lungs and she would still be clueless.

Now, if it sounds like the Winkler is constipated, that’s only because he is, in fact, constipated. Seriously, though, the look of this guy trying to pass a tennis-ball size dook while signing into the phone is pretty hard to top.

Hard, but not impossible. Here’s what he looks like signing into a mic.

Wow. This guy has all the stage presence of Trig Palin. He also has this weird habit of tugging on his neckerchief

when he gets to the emotional parts, but that really only serves to remind viewers that he’s wearing a fucking neckerchief. EXTREME BEHAVIOR!

But let’s not get sidetracked by the video, because even if they hadn’t decided to act out the song spliced with clips of beefy men rocking out in a candlelit living room, the song itself would be enough to earn it recognition in the darkest chapter in pop music history. I mean lines like “It’s really good to hear your voice saying my name/it sounds so sweet/coming from the lips of an angel/hearing those words it makes me weak;” that’s some Lonestar-grade sap right there. Then they add in the crap about “girl you make it hard to be faithful.” EXTREME BEHAVIOR!

Need I remind you, Hinder is supposed to be a metal band. Maybe the complete lack of other power ballads bemoaning monogamy is more than simply an oversight by every hard rock band, ever. Fuck, even Cat Stevens wouldn’t write about this shit. Nevertheless, the problem of having to choose between two smoking hotties, is exactly the kind of problem that the teenagers inclined to listen to post-grunge shit like Hinder can relate to. Not so much because it’s a problem they’ve had, but because it’s a problem they’d like to have. It’s the allure of being wanted that allows people to overlook the fact that the guy in the story is a douchebag.

I just can’t say enough bad things about this song. Winkler’s singing voice sounds like a hippopotamus being strangled to death. This song is a bastard love child of "Bad Day” and “With Arms Wide Open.” Every time they pronounce “and” as a two syllable word, I feel like I’ve been infected with herpes. I honestly can’t imagine how this song could be worse.

Fuck.

Music Schmusic: Worst Decade Ever

2010-01-04T20:22:00.001-08:00

I stopped making New Years resolutions when I was 12. I had resolved to make myself less cynical. A resounding success, don't you think? That was when I realized that the annual passage from one year to the next was no more significant than the passage of May into June, Monday into Tuesday, 8:50 and 8:51, and more importantly, none of those changes had any impact on my deeply ingrained mental reflex to clap sarcastically when a friend falls down the stairs. But in spite of my general antipathy for New Years, I do want to pay tribute to our bygone decade for leaving us some of the worst pop music ever. I can't help being a cynic. Now that I realize that, it's time to put it to good use, because we can stop making steaming piles of fetid shit into Top 40 hits. So for the next ten days, we're going to relive the worst decade ever, in hopes that we may never speak of it again.

Sisquo -- The Thong Song (2000)

Looking back on it, this whole shitshow of a decade just started badly. Eleven days in, fears that Y2K would turn all of our VCRs into ungodly implements of destruction still lingering, and this is unleashed on the world via "The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps" soundtrack. Is there any hope found in the fact that "The Nutty Professor II" opened atop the box office, while "The Thong Song" topped out at No. 3? No, there most certainly is not.

The song itself starts off with something of a prologue, in which Sisqo explains why he's speaking to you. He wants to tell all the ladies out there about "the finer things in life," and with the string quartet playing in the background you just might believe him. But wait, man: this is the 21st fucking century. We have drum machines! Once we have a beat, it takes this Kel Mitchell-looking motherfucker mere seconds to drop a reference to Ricky Martin's equally awful hit "Livin' La Vida Loca."

"The Thong Song" owes every bit of its success to its famous hook, because that's all there is to the song. I'm not being facetious; look at the fucking lyrics. This song is one three-verse hook on a loop. In fact, the only lyrics in this song that aren't part of the hook are our occasional glimpses into Sisqo's internal monologue, when he explains "I think I'll sing it again." There were five fucking writers credits on this song. Even if all one did is program the drum machine, and another one found the string sample there would still be three people trying to figure out how many times you can repeat the line "Baby make your booty go da na, da na" before all of the listeners kill themselves. (Answer: 14.)

But the lyrics those five writers came up with must be pretty good, right? Well, "she had dumps like a truck, truck, truck/thighs like what, what, what." Ok, I'm done.

The worst part of this song isn't the awful, repetitive lyrics, the bizarre key change or even Sisqo's really fake gymnastics in the video, it's the fact that the whole thing is catchy as hell. After all, it has to be. It's a four minute song based around a string loop, a canned beat and a handful of cobbled together nonsense phrases. But all together, this song could probably play for 15 minutes before you would notice anything is wrong. And it sticks with you. It's been ten years and I still can't say the word "thong" without following it up with "thong thong thong thong." And now writing this will pretty much ensure this song is stuck in my head for another ten years.

What was the point of this project again?

A Surprising Treat

2009-10-26T15:37:00.000-07:00

We started doing Movies Schmovies five years ago, so we've been around the block a few times when it comes to bad movies. Over that time, we've assembled a pretty consistent assortment of truisms. Among them: local video rental places are endless fonts of awful movies, large budgets and commercial success can produce low-quality shit just as readily as teenagers with camcorders, and vignette movies are always good for a laugh.

I've lost count of all the vignette movies we've rented, watched, and suffered through over the last few years. Off the top of my head, there's Tales from the Hood, Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror, Nite Tales, Creepshow 1-3, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Campfire Tales, Campfire Stories, Ghost Stories¹, Quicksilver Highway, and I'm sure there are several more. The vast majority of them have been really, really stupid--though there are some notable moments of stupidity--such as Buster Poindexter's Ranger Bill in Campfire Stories (the source of the blog's title quote), or Flavor Flav apparently being unaware that this genre existed prior to Nite Tales (or that he, as the film's host, should have some kind of personality).

So when a horror anthology actually turns out to be good...well, we don't know how to feel about that, really. With the possible exception of Twilight Zone, that hasn't really happened before (and even that's stretching a bit). It'd be like a Michael Bay movie without explosions, a Tim Burton flick that didn't extol the weird and decry normalcy, a video game movie worth watching, collard greens that don't taste good, or a tree that's not made out of wood!

This is the dilemma we found ourselves in when watching Trick 'r Treat. Direct-to-DVD horror vignette movies are always cause for celebration around the Movies Schmovies compound, so we were pretty excited about it long before we'd actually heard anything. And then we started hearing things, things like "it's really good." This, naturally, intrigued us--such a thing surely wasn't possible. And let's face it, people said Paranormal Activity was going to be good too.

So we decided that this past weekend's soiree would begin with Paranormal Activity and end with a rental of Trick 'r Treat. This plan hit a snag when I actually tried to rent the movie, and found that there was a waiting list. Another nearby video store was similarly devoid of the film, so I resorted to the purchasing option. Here, too, I was met with defeat: every DVD store I visited on this side of the Mississippi had sold out. We finally managed to pick up the last copy at a Wal-Mart in Iowa on the night of the festivities, shortly before our ill-fated visit to one couple's sprawling San Diego estate.

So perhaps it was just the lingering stupor of shaky-cam garbage, but we actually really enjoyed Trick 'r Treat. The stories were clever and fun, never taking themselves too seriously. We've seen attempts to intertwine vignettes in films like this before, and such attempts rarely work. Here, the storylines weave in and out of one another, jumping back and forth in time, and doing so with a natural fluidity. The real benefit of this method was that it allowed for multiple twists in each story, and tied up different plot and character threads in unexpected ways.

The cast is largely drawn from recent superhero movies, boasting one X-Man, one X-Man villain, and Spider-Man's professor. The presence of real actors--as opposed to rappers--already set this film above the bar set by its contemporaries. Some of the characters are certainly more developed than others, and I'm not sure Dylan Baker's character quite worked in all the ways they used him, but overall the stories were pretty good. Overall, the whole movie is a celebration of Halloween, at times creepy and at times goofy and reveling in both.

I could go into more detail, but you'd be better off finding out for yourselves. Netflix or Blockbuster or whatever, you might as well give Trick 'r Treat a try. You could do a lot worse.

1. I hesitate to include this one, since it barely met the qualifications of "movie." It was more like a tape of community theater monologues.

Antichrist beats me at my own game

2009-10-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, a movie comes along that I can't bring myself to pay to see. There are some movies you just shouldn't have to tell another human being that you would like to watch. But after hearing from multiple sources what otherworldly shit Lars Von Treir's Antichrist is, I knew I had to see it. Online. Alone. In the privacy of my own home. For free.

By now you've probably figured out Tom and my M.O. We intentionally seek out things we expect to find stupid, and then, when proven correct, we make fun of those things on the internet. So was my intention for Antichrist, but the more I watched, the more I came to believe this movie was making fun of me for believing I live in a rational world where self-disemboweling foxes don't speak English, or where roving bands of faceless women don't patrol the woods. This movie had decided that it was going to beat me at my own game, in a concerted effort to kill every part of me. The part that never saw Willem Dafoe's balls before dies first, approximately one minute in.

After seeing Willem Dafoe boning his mother, a small child throws himself out of a second story window, as any sane child would react under similar circumstances. I respond with a joke about Eric Clapton, but this movie came for a fight. After 50 minutes of Dafoe's ridiculously boring attempts to psychoanalyze his grieving wife, the movie comes back strong with the afore mentioned fox, in a scene so stupid I lack the words to even make fun of it:

The movie senses I am dazed, and moves in with a vengeance. Dafoe's wife smashes his testicles with a piece of lumber, and then masturbates him until he ejaculates blood. While he is unconscious from the pain, she drills a hole through his ankle and screws a grindstone through it. By this point, I'm starting to have fond memories of Vampires vs. Zombies.

For some reason, they launch into another round of psychotherapy. At this point, my pride has overruled my rational mind and multiple other body systems which are ordering me to stop. I am determined to finish this movie.

The movie decides it's time for more genital mutilation. This time, the woman turns on herself. Rusty scissors. Vag. Stupid squirt sound effect. Ok, movie, you win.

Antichrist has beaten me at my own game, because there is nothing I can say to make this movie more ridiculous than it actually is. The only joke is on me, because I watched it.

Schmovies Review: Paranormal Activity (or, Poultrygeist)

2009-10-25T17:09:00.001-07:00

Truly frightening horror movies scare people by creating a familiar situation that the audience can relate to, putting characters in positions of vulnerability, building suspense and delivering.
There is a short list of movies people people have, from time to time, considered the most frightening:
-- Halloween: Great movie, not particularly frightening, but easily one of the most innovative horror flicks. The original Halloween was particularly good at establishing familiar surroundings and playing on common real-life fears.
-- Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Basically a more raw, visceral version of Halloween. It had the added element of being set in Texas, which is terrifying in and of itself. By pioneering the low-budget horror film, TCM is in many ways the grandfather of Blair Witch Project and, ultimately, Paranormal Activity.
-- The Blair Witch Project: This movie did many things right: it put viewers directly into a situation they could relate to, built a ton of suspense, and like Halloween, played on common fears (though not as common). But it never delivered. You don't see the witch, you don't see anything, and that's the problem. Anything from feet running past the camera to a full on witch sighting in the final frames would have made this movie great--or at least moderately satisfying. As is, it's just stupid. Ultimately, Blair Witch Project is remembered more for the hype that surrounded it and the disappointment that inevitably followed it than anything actually in the movie.
-- The Exorcist: Do you believe that the devil can and would possess the body of a 13-year-old girl? If so, then you might think that The Exorcist is deeply disturbing. If not, all you're left with is an image of the devil as a potty-mouthed 13-year-old girl whose most pronounced power is to beat a priest at the dozens.

Over the last few weeks, we've been hearing reports of a movie so scary that it has moviegoers rushing from the theater with a combination or shit, piss and vomit flowing from their various orifices. So, colostomy bags in hand, we set out to find Paranormal Activity.

First, a note on the marketing of Paranormal Activity. Regardless of the quality of the film, the marketing is a clear success. The TV campaign shows little to no footage from the movie itself, instead relying on night-vision shots of a shocked audience, and the promise that it's so frightening that it might not even be at a theater near you, unless you go to their website and "demand" it. It's all a throwback to the William Castle-era horror movies which made outlandish claims that "doctors trained in the treatment of fear will be present in the lobby during all showings." The fact that this movie went from being independently released in 2007, to topping the box office in 2009 is a success.

So after all the hype and stories of people unable to watch the end, "Paranormal Activity" had built some lofty expectations. What we got was evidence of how -- without the suspenseful music and jump cuts -- ghost stories are pretty mundane. But we'll come back to that.

We meet Micah and Katie, the young couple who make up half of the cast (and 90% of the screen time). Actually, perhaps that's unfair: Katie's cleavage spends enough time on screen that it might as well get billed on the marquee. Micah has decided that it would be fun to bring a camera into the bedroom; sounds good so far. Oh, he wants to film the ghost his girlfriend thinks has been haunting her since she was eight? Okay, we're here anyway, we may as well keep watching. The preceding paragraph accounts for the first 40 minutes of the movie.

Micah, we soon find out, is a deeply unsympathetic douchebag. Not that either character is particularly relatable, living opulently in a palatial San Diego mansion without any visible means of income. Micah claims to be a day-trader, who spent half of what he made in one day on a high quality movie camera to film the supposed paranormal events happening in the vast upstairs. He sincerely believes that filming his girlfriend's encounters will be fun, and openly taunts the demon, in hopes of capturing some cool video. He does all this despite Katie's growing fright, and the escalating intensity of the encounters. In fact, he regularly takes steps to get Katie to draw out the ghosts--which she refuses--and to ensure that the events will continue happening with greater theatricality. It's reasonably assumed that he plans to sell his footage, which may explain his repeated attempts to get Katie to have sex with him on film. One way or another, he would cash in--either on the public's fascination with lame ghost hunting videos, or on the increasingly expansive definition of "celebrity" in the term "celebrity sex tape." Katie is apparently on to his schemes, and so never sleeps in fewer than two shirts and an underwire.

Katie looks a bit like the love child of Zooey Deschanel and Rachel Dratch, and claims to be an English major. Despite a supposed literary background, the only book we ever see her reading is a "For Dummies" book with a blurred-out cover, which she treats like a textbook. Micah claims to be a day trader, though he never actually day trades anything, or appears to have any kind of job or friends outside of the house. This is probably an accurate depiction of life for a day trader. Katie has one friend, who comes over to lend a credulous ear and make bead jewelry with her (the main source of income of most English majors). A psychic who dresses like Carl Sagan rounds out the cast.

The demon joins, seemingly gladly, in an arms race of douchebaggery with Micah, escalating from stomping around the couple's stately four-bedroom Xanadu-esque pleasure dome, loudly thumping up the far too many stairs, slamming and knocking on their bedroom door, flipping lights on and off, and turning on their TV, all in the middle of the night, whenever the 3:00 a.m. freight train passes through their backyard.

As circumstances dictate, Micah is either an enthusiastic ghost hunter, or an avowed skeptic. He taunts Katie for her attempts to call in a demonologist and generally makes fun of the psychic, while he himself runs around the house experimenting with Electronic Voice Phenomena and spends his days dissecting the previous night's ghost videos like an even dopier John Madden.

"See Katie, the demon is going to send his cornerback on a zone blitz from the hallway. He's been beating our left tackle all night and when that happens you're going that leaves you vulnerable on the blind side. Boom! We need to shift our strong-side set if we're going to give you enough time in the pocket to not get possessed. The demon is going after the girl, because the only way he's going to get possession of the girls' soul is by going after the girl. What? Maybe I should sleep by the door? Yeah, I don't think that's going to help."

The movie bravely tries to eschew typical horror movie character archetypes. Our heroine, rather than being tough-as-nails and pure as the driven snow, is emotionally abused and utterly powerless. Our hero, rather than being a dashing crusader who rushes in to save his girl from mortal peril, instead always takes two steps toward rushing in to save her, then stops, returns for the camera, and meanders toward our intrepid heroine. And our psychic, who in any other film would be an endless font of information about the spirit world and how to combat its inhabitants, is more like a marriage counselor who exists primarily as a reason for the couple to relate their backstory. His only useful contribution to the story is the explanation that the haunting is due not to a ghost, but to a demon. Demons being outside his "expertise," he refers them to a Demonologist, then leaves. Later on, when it turns out his recommended Demonologist is out of the country (something he was apparently aware of), and since there are apparently no other Demonologists or Psychics or Exorcists within driving distance of San Diego, he returns. It's a short-lived return, wherein he gets really scared and runs away.

The demon and the douchebag's war of attrition continues throughout the film. The demon indecisively moves the door a few inches, so the douchebag conducts an EVP interview where he asks the Bridgekeeper's questions from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The douchebag gets a Ouija Board to communicate with the demon, so the demon spells out "Diane" then starts a fire that it looks like the planchette is hitting 88 miles per hour. The douchebag spreads baby powder on the floor so that the demon's chicken-like footprints show up, so the demon punches a portrait of the douchebag that's hanging on the wall. At that point, we decided to side with the demon.

During all this, the demon is continuing his assault on Katie, which includes such terrible torment as "making her stand staring at the bed for an hour, then making her go outside and sleep on a swing" and "pulling the sheet off her foot." If this had gone on much longer, we'd expect him to resort to drawing on her face in permanent marker and putting her hand in a dish of warm water. Perhaps she's just being haunted by the ghost of her douchebag boyfriend.

Ultimately, the demon has had enough (which shows a lot of patience, we'd had more than enough by the time the movie was half an hour over). He drags Katie out of bed and down the hall, where he bites her in the side, demonstrating (among other things) that he needs some serious dental work. Things ramp quickly up to the conclusion--and by quickly, I mean mind-numbingly slowly. Micah finally wants to leave the house and tries to convince Katie, but she strangely thinks everything is going to be fine, and (in an auto-tuned voice) says "I think I'd rather stay here, shaw-ty-ee." T-Pain would be proud.

The film ends with another bout of Katie's Ambien-induced sleep-standing-and-staring. She walks down the hall and screams, and Micah comes to her rescue. After some distant screaming and shouting, there's silence, until Micah's body is thrown against the camera by a blood-stained Katie, who crouches down to sniff at him, then looks at the camera and smiles with teeth taken from Jennifer's Body.

There are a couple of unimportant subplots we ignored, like the fire which consumed Katie's old house and the girl named Diane that this demon apparently haunted in the '60s, but if the movie didn't care enough to tie those up, then neither do we.

Did you think "Groundhog Day" was scary? If so, then maybe you'd find Paranormal Activity's habit of showing a ghost scene, then replaying the scene on Micah's computer the next morning absolutely terrifying. The rest of us realize why the trailer didn't show any scenes from the movie. The only two scenes the filmmakers could have shown would have shot their load before anyone bought a ticket, and why demand the cow when you get the milk for free. The filmmakers seemingly couldn't decide whether they wanted a shaky-cam "real footage" film like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, or a polished horror movie. Consequently, there are obvious cuts that somehow fail to interrupt the flow of scripted dialogue, and quite a bit of editing that makes one wonder who--since our principal characters are dead and missing respectively at the end--bothered to try to pare it down to a moderately dramatic narrative. Despite some kind of professional editing, a good 50% of the movie is spent on shots of two people sleeping with very little happening. The other 50% is spent on shots of two people arguing with very little happening.

By the end, "something happening" would have been a godsend. There aren't many movies that would benefit from someone in a big, fake, rubbery demon costume walking through a doorway and saying "hey, um...boo," but this is one of them. A horned devil, a creepy clown, a long-haired Japanese girl--basically any Tim Curry character would have been effective. When the footsteps were ascending the (far too many) stairs at the end, there were people in the audience who were quivering; they could have literally revealed anything and people would have screamed. Instead, they forgot the principal rule established by Blair Witch: the unseen is only scary if eventually it becomes the seen. Being a visual medium, movies require a visual payoff. Lacking that, you're left with a weak stage play, or a 1940s radio drama.

Don't get us wrong, we're glad to see a movie that values suspense over shock, but if the work of Rob Zombie and Eli Roth is waterboarding, this movie is solitary confinement. Sure, it's a different kind of torture, but it's still torture, and while it may qualify us to be Republican Presidential candidates, it's not enjoyable.

The Cold War spawned horror movies about invasions of outsiders and the threats of military science. Suburban anxiety in the '70s and '80s spawned horror movies about the dangers at home--psychos calling from inside the house, escaped mental patients on Halloween, Satanic cults everywhere. The '90s and early 2000s brought us J-horror and torture porn, an extreme dichotomy between bizarre and possibly symbolic, and bloody but mindless. Paranormal Activity is the inevitable result of a culture that supports innumerable shows like "Ghost Hunters," "Paranormal State," "A Haunting," and so forth, making mountains of ratings out of the molehills of mundane "paranormal" encounters. PA tries to skirt a line between "realistic"--inasmuch as any of these series about plumbers exploring hypnagogic hallucinations with EMF meters is realistic--and theatrical, but never commits to either one.

See, what this really shows is that, if these "real-life" hauntings were real, and if they could be documented, they'd be boring as all hell. The reason people watch shows like "A Haunting" is not (just) because of the "true" stories of ghostly encounters, but because of all the mood-setting music, dramatizations, jump-cuts and creative editing, and other elements designed to dress up otherwise boring night-vision and people telling stories. Remember, most of these events are the sort of things that reasonable people sleep through. That doesn't make for good drama or excitement.

All told, Paranormal Activity is very much the spiritual successor to The Blair Witch Project, and consequently it's a lot like the paranormal events it's meant to explore: talked about by many, scary to those inclined to believe, but in the light of day and reason, completely without scare or substance.

In two weeks, The Fourth Kind will hit theaters, apparently exchanging aliens for ghosts. It seems like it'll be four times as scary as Paranormal Activity...what's four times zero again?

Join us next time when we review the award-winning shaky-cam exploration of oft-unexplored pleasure centers, Perineal Activity. Damned if it taint the best film we've seen all year.

Deep Thought

2009-10-10T22:08:00.000-07:00

"C.H.U.D." proves that Guiliani really did make a difference.

Unsolicited Advice

2009-10-09T18:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Screenwriters: How many different adaptations of "A Christmas Carol" do we need? I mean, really, another one? I hope these are really easy to write.

There were a few more ...

Also, here, here, here, and here.

Not to belabor this point or anything, but ...

Am I getting through ?

Apparently not.

Dear Jim Carrey: Typecasting sucks.

Dear Producers of the Nightmare on Elm Street remake: The world is not ready for a Freddy Krueger who looks like the Cat in the Hat.

Dear Kevin Williamson: This had better be good.

Dear Jamie Kennedy: Stay dead.

Dear Rob Zombie: Fucking stop already! cc: The Final Destination franchise.

Dear Whoever Made This: More, please.

Dear Darthleather: You are a racist. Nice handle, by the way.

See Saw

2009-10-08T18:30:00.000-07:00

The "Saw" series is approaching its sixth installment. There's a large part of me that wonders why the series continues limping along, dripping copious amounts of blood as it shuffles onward, apparently unaware that it died several films ago. The last one I watched was the third one, and that was at least one too many.

But as often (and justifiably) maligned as the films are, I don't think we should just throw the gory baby out with the bathwater. The series really started to lose me sometime during the first sequel, but I still think that "Saw"--sans roman numerals of any sort--is a good movie.

There's a lot going on in "Saw." You've got the police investigation into a killer who borrows a lot from "Seven," you've got the increasingly panicked banter of Cary Elwes and...that other guy as they try to figure out what's going on, you've got the stalking of Cary's family, and you've got Danny Glover stalking Cary's stalker. The core of the movie is the kind of clever dilemma that gets proposed in a philosophy textbook, with a twist ending that I thought was actually quite well done.

For that matter, I like Jigsaw's motivation. In a very bizarre way, it's kind of like "It's a Wonderful Life," where he's changing people's perceptions and making them appreciate what they have by putting them through incredibly terrible experiences. He's forcing a motivational speaker's background on his targets--new perspective through trauma and adversity.

It's also worth noting, I think, that the first "Saw" is relatively light on gore. Sure, there's the disgusting settings that permeate the film, but as far as blood, guts, and violence go, the sequels really ramp that up--much to their detriment. There were a couple of scenes in the second one that really made me squirm, chiefly the pit of needles, but I didn't think the first one had anything along those lines.

What I'm trying to say in this rambling post working from old memories is that I think the "Saw" franchise deserves a lot of the abuse it gets. It largely kicked off the "gore over substance" trend that's killing modern horror movies *cough*RobZombie*cough*, and its sequels have spiraled into self-absorption and obsolescence. But let's not judge a movie by its sequels; "Saw" stands on its own as a pretty decent horror flick.

And if they'd stuck with that, instead of getting bogged down in Jigsaw as a character and his henchmen and whatnot, it might have made for a good series.

Schmovies Review: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

2009-08-08T21:09:00.000-07:00

It has been a very long time since we've seen a movie as ridiculously, hilariously, epically awful as G.I Joe: The Rise of Cobra. We scarcely know where to begin in describing it. We'd warn you about spoilers, but the movie kind of spoils itself.

Let's start with the wide view: G.I. Joe is essentially Team America played entirely straight. This makes it either the most brilliant, Kaufmanesque parody of over-the-top patriotic military porn sci-fi action films ever, or the flaming piece of crap-gilded crap that it actually is.

A little less generally, the dialogue sounds like it's trying to parody the Cheat Commandos. Again, this is either metafictional brilliance or complete ineptitude. The fact that Marlon Wayans co-stars suggests the latter. Every significant line of dialogue is either some terribly hackneyed action movie cliché, a line that was written to be used in the trailer, or both. The Baroness in particular speaks almost exclusively in movie trailer lines, while Duke is essentially reading from the "angst-ridden soldier with an unwavering sense of duty" archetype handbook.

By the way, Marlon Wayans? We shouldn't be too hard on him. He was actually one of the best actors in the film.

Let that sink in for a moment: Marlon Wayans, of White Chicks, Little Man, and Norbit, is one of the best--if not the best--actors in the movie.

We'll give you a minute to stop screaming. As with any other aspect of this movie, we could go on for pages about the bad acting, but there's one obvious place to start: ~~Tommy Solomon~~ Joseph Gordon-Levitt's turn as Cobra Commander. Cobra Commander should be a very difficult character to screw up. He's a cartoon supervillain who wears a mask that completely covers his face, thereby eliminating any need to emote facially. Apparently, ~~the guy who has twice failed to get into Alex Mack's pants~~ Gordon-Levitt thought that spending the entire movie in a mask that covered the lower half of his face was a serious hindrance to his acting abilities, so he compensated by constantly moving around and gesturing like a spastic C-3P0. Seriously, it's as though he thought he was being directed by Harold Zoid.

By the way, for being Cobra Commander, he doesn't do much commanding. In fact, he spends the vast majority of the movie allowing viewers to think he's just an updated Dr. Mindbender. If you remember Dr. Mindbender at all, you might recall that he looked something like this:

Bald, giant moustache, monocle, shirtless, cape, purple pants. And yet, between the silly latex-and-oxygen mask costume and Gordon-Levitt's hamminess, they managed to make this doctor even more ridiculous.

Running through the rest of the major actors: Channing Tatum did a good job of playing a soldier who'd experienced one too many concussions, and occasionally mistook the scenery for bubblegum; Sienna Miller certainly was present, two parts of her more than the rest; Christopher Eccleston was fairly competent; Arnold Vosloo's Zartan had the most fake, meandering accent in the movie (he's from South Africa, so maybe it's his natural accent, in which case his natural South African accent sounds like a really fake accent from some other place); and Dennis Quaid can no pretend to be superior to Randy at Quaid family gatherings.

The broad swaths of the story were actually quite promising, very much in line with some of the ridiculous schemes perpetrated by Cobra over the years. The insanely complicated plan involves Destro orchestrating a robbery of weapons he created and sold to the government, so that he can use them to destroy national monuments and attack major world capitals, all as a cover for the installation of Zartan as the President of the United States (presumably, this plot also included a forged birth certificate and a forty-year-old announcement in a Hawaiian newspaper, but those scenes were likely left for the Director's Cut). Really, that could have been cool, but as always the Devil is in the details. So, incidentally, are the shitty parts of the movie.

Let's start with Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, whose appearances feel like they were wandering in and out from a kung-fu flick filming next door. Since the rest of the movie was already a mishmash of every conceivable overused action movie trope, the filmmakers decided that they had to mine every conceivable overused kung-fu movie trope to pad out this overexposed, unnecessary subplot. Snake Eyes is another one of those characters who should be impossible to mess up: he's a badass ninja commando who doesn't talk. Naturally, the costume designers decided that the most important thing for a character who doesn't talk to have was a mouth molded into his rubber mask. This is in addition to his Joel Schumacher-esque muscular rubber outfit, which is all the rage with ninjas these days. After that, they thought it prudent to show us how Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow grew up together in Japan, because as the Star Wars prequelshave demonstrated, nothing enhances a badass character's coolness and intimidation factors quite like intimate glimpses into their awkward childhood years. Following this, the filmmakers apparently got confused about what '80s series they were reviving, and just used the old Splinter/Shredder origin instead.

Then there's the giant cliché web linking Duke, the Baroness, and Cobra Commander. See, Duke and the Baroness were engaged (before she met the Baron de Cobray. Yes, "de Cobray," a name which sounds like an obvious front for Cobra, but this is never remarked upon, and he's a witless patsy. I'd call this a red herring, but that's giving them way too much credit), and her little brother, Rex Lewis, was in Duke's unit in war-torn Waristan. He promised to take care of little Rex (a science officer, apparently those are real), which eventually amounted to sending him into a building alone during a bombing run. Naturally, Rex got blowed to smithereens, leaving Duke and pre-Baroness's relationship in shambles, and making Duke ride around on a motorcycle like he's Lorenzo Lamas.

Naturally, it turns out that Rex survived (though terribly scarred) and became the Doctor, who actually was (or later became) Cobra Commander. We don't know about you, but we're pretty sure that this origin ranks below "former used car salesman" and "disfigured snake-man from an ancient secret society in the Himalayas" origins for Cobra Commander. There aren't many names less threatening than "Lewis."

All this means that Baroness gets to make a Heel Face Turn by the end, breaking her Cobra conditioning to save Duke and yadda yadda. If you didn't see it coming by the cut-and-paste nature of the plot, then her frequent flashbacks to sweet moments with her brain-damaged fiancé were there to hammer the foreshadowing home.

As long as we're on the subject of the Baroness, it seems prudent to mention that while the movie gave just about every other character some goofy accent (or in Cobra Commander's case, three different goofy voices), they decided to take the Baroness's away. Perhaps it's because it didn't fit with her inane new backstory, or perhaps it's because they felt that they were already taxing Sienna Miller's talents (both of them) by having her traipse around the Arctic with her catsuit unzipped.

Speaking of the Arctic, it's worth mentioning that the film claims to take place "In the not too distant future" (though it's unclear if it's Next Sunday, A.D.), but the Arctic ice sheet is still ten stories thick. Take that, Al Gore!

Which brings us to the science and technology content of the movie. Now, it's a sci-fi action flick based on a cartoon, we're not expecting Apollo 13. That being said, it's fair to say that the filmmakers have learned everything they know about science from other action movies. Scarlett starts things off by telling Ripcord that she doesn't find him attractive because that would be emotional, and science can't study or quantify emotions. Straw Vulcan is absolutely right; scientists are totally unemotional, and there's no way that science can study things like emotions. Not more than ten minutes after this particular idiocy, the Joes encounter a dead Neo-Viper, from whom they need to extract some information. Thankfully, as our stoic redhead notes, the brain lives for a couple of minutes after death, so they can shove some giant spikes into the brain and find out where Cobra's headquarters is. What's that, you say? Brain death is one of the ways that we determine whether or not someone is actually dead? Well, I can't imagine that being an important thing to know.

Also, we're pretty confused as to what particle accelerators have to do with weaponizing nanobots. We're also pretty sure that the writers were pretty confused about what particle accelerators do, only having some vague notion that they spin something around. And they even got that part wrong.

The technology has some similar issues. Part of the problem is with the special effects, which often look like they come from some late-90s Saturday-morning cartoon. Consequently, the undersea dogfights, Duke and Ripcord running around in their Halo suits, and various other points of painfully obvious CGI lead the viewer to wonder why they didn't just animate the movie in the first place. But even if we excuse the animation that someone apparently did on a ColecoVision, there are some things that just don't quite make sense.

We can start with those Halo-style bionic suits, which really served no purpose except to allow Duke and Ripcord to jump around like Spider-Man and run really fast even when stopped. There were times when the suits seemed to weigh quite a bit, and there were more times when they seemed to be completely massless. Strangely enough, this largely corresponded to when the suits were real, and when they were computer animation.

For some reason, though he goes to ridiculous extremes to keep his involvement in the terror plot a secret (though slack-jawed Duke managed to implicate him with minimal mental effort--the maximum amount he could provide), Destro slaps his company's logo onto every piece of equipment in the film--including, of course, the various doomsday devices and weapons that he's sold to the villains. Now, if Bill Gates were trying to take over the world, do you think he would slap the Microsoft logo onto everything?

Okay, bad example. Point being, Destro's kind of dumb, but it's probably genetic. Turns out that he's descended from a long line of weapons dealers who got caught. We can only assume that his 17th century ancestor had engraved "M.A.R.S." into all the gunpowder barrels and crossbow bolts he was selling. As punishment, he was forced to dress as Kilroy; modern Destro got the updated punishment of looking like Max Headroom.

One other technology moment that really sticks out is during one of the underwater chase/dogfight scenes. While Duke and Baroness are escaping in their stolen Cobra vessel, her cannon runs out of...lasers. They're passing through a trench (but don't compare this battle to the Death Star or anything!), so Duke launches something out behind the craft. The mine, or whatever, separates out into several pieces, which attach to the walls of the chasm, connected by deadly laser beams like a hallway in a robbery flick. While this is effective in shredding their pursuer, one has to wonder what kind of utility such a device would have in the open ocean, where this ship would presumably be doing most of its fighting. I guess Cobra plans for everything, except inevitable betrayal.

We've touched on aspects of the direction tangentially, but it's worth mentioning that even for a cotton candy action movie, the explosions sometimes seem really random. The flashbacks were even more random, popping up every time it seemed like there might be a coherent story thread going on. Thankfully, they put those little X-Files style setting captions in the bottom of the screen when they transitioned scenes, so the viewer knew when and where each event was happening. Apparently the caption writer suffered from the same attention deficit disorder as the rest of the crew, because the captions typically lagged far behind the scene transition.

There was an obligatory training montage, set to a song that sampled "Get it On (Bang a Gong)," which really only heightened the comparison between this and "Team America." Baroness's "promise my brother will never die" line dovetails nicely with that, and one expects Dennis Quaid's "I'm-a break all the rules" speech to end with a description of how he tested Duke's loyalty through fellatio.

The movie ends triumphantly, with Destro and Cobra Commander locked in giant soup cans in Magneto's cell. Marlon Wayans' movie-long attempt at finding out if Scarlett is a natural redhead kind of peters out without resolution, but he and Duke get offered full positions on the G.I. Joe team. The team boards a plane toward their next mission, and Dennis Quaid wishes them all good luck. Then, he gets on the plane with them. I guess Joe regulations require goodbyes to be said on the ground.

We could go on and on--why would the White House farm out their security bunker to an international arms dealer, then use it after he's been exposed as part of an international terrorist plot? How did Dr. Mindbender get access to cutting-edge nanotechnology in the middle of backwards Waristan?--but we'd be here all night. To sum everything up, G.I. Joe is a terrible movie. It took some real effort to out-awful a movie about Sgt. Slaughter leading the fight against sci-fi snake people from the Himalayas, but this movie manages to suck considerably more than the original G.I. Joe film. That being said, it's not terrible the way Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was terrible. The movie was hilarious; it was a real treat to watch for people who like watching awful movies. So if you're looking to get your Joel Hodgson or Mike Nelson on, The Rise of Cobra is a nice diversion. If you'd rather save your money for good movies, then we hear better things about G-Force.

Join us next time when we review that critically-acclaimed pornographic classic, The Bi-Curious Case of Benjamin's Butthole.

Some short thoughts on Wolverine

2009-05-25T15:59:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted from The Fortress of Soliloquy.

I saw X-Men Origins: Wolverine last night. It was at least as terrible as everyone's been saying, which is a shame, because I like Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber, and I thought the first two X-Men movies were quite good. But, where X-Men III suffered from too much story (among other things), this one suffered from far, far too little...among other things. Spoilers from here on out.

First, there's the matter of Wolverine's name. Now, my fianceé and I both concluded that he must have taken the name "Logan" from the man he thought was his father, and that his actual father must have been screaming "Mister Logan" or something along those lines at the beginning. This wasn't clear, largely because it wasn't easy to hear what Fathertooth was saying, and could have used some clarifying.
What muddies things is that Wolvie apparently started going by "Logan" after he left Stryker's team and started living with Kayla...but then Wraith and Stryker call him "Logan" when he's with them later. This could have been easily remedied, but the way it played out, it became one of the film's many glaring continuity errors.
Among the most glaring, as my fianceé noted, was Logan's disappearing clothes. He's wearing his leather jacket in the helicopter (a jacket that's at least very similar to the one he wears in the other films), but not when he gets to the island. At some point, in between cuts, he loses his shirt and ends up in nothing more than a wifebeater. Was it so hot on Three Mile Island that Logan just had to strip down between shots? Take this with the number of times where people suddenly appear where they shouldn't be (when did Gambit get onto the roof after being knocked out? How did Wolverine suddenly reappear in the lab after Kayla's scream, with no apparent doors or windows in that end of the room?) and the number of places where we completely lose track of how much time things take (so they left Logan strapped to the machine, waiting, while they went and pressed him some new dog tags?), and what you should end up with is a jobless continuity editor.
Gosh, there sure were an awful lot of characters in this movie. Too bad so few of them had well-defined powers (so Deadpool can...swing things fast?) or any real character development. Stryker's team could have been half its size or smaller, and the movie would have been much better for it.
Unfortunately, this movie seems to have taken to heart that timeless characterization shortcut, telling instead of showing. We don't need to see Gambit do a daring escape from Three Mile Island, we just need Will.i.am to tell us how badass he is, and that's totally enough.
Proof that Wolverine is better than any other superhero: where other heroes have one character-defining tragedy, Wolverine has four--although the fourth one is really just the second one again. I don't think I've ever seen one character do the Big No this many times in a single film before.
You know, I don't really mind Gambit as a character all that much, and I'm glad that this wasn't a film full of Claremontistic stereotype accents, but would it have killed Taylor Kitsch to make a choice about the Cajun drawl? Either use it or don't, but don't let your accent meander all over the south.
So, how 'bout those crappy special effects? I can't remember the last time I saw effects this bad in a theatrical film. I'm not sure whose decision it was to apparently go 99% CGI on the claws (at least the metal ones), but they looked realistic maybe once or twice. The other films at least occasionally used prop claws instead of animated ones; were there really none left around after the last three movies? That wasn't the only bad CGI, either--the sky during the cooling tower fight looked like a Windows desktop background, and at one point there was a lens flare that screamed to me "this movie made with Photoshop '98." Xavier at the end looked even more mannequin-esque than in X-Men III, and I have to imagine it'd work better just to use some damn makeup. Everything CGI was noticeably CGI, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of having CGI effects in the first place. We've been doing better computer animation with more seamless integration into live action for over ten years; what is this movie's excuse?
Speaking of things that were done better ten years ago, I don't think I've ever seen a less convincing fat suit than the one they used for the Blob. It worked pretty well for one of the close-up face shots toward the end, but otherwise it was rigid in all the wrong ways, never seemed to have any real weight to it, and it certainly didn't react to punches and combat the way anything even resembling real fat would. They tried to use CGI to make it look more realistic, but it only hurt things to see Blob's man-boobs bouncing out of sync with the rest of his body--CGI by the iJiggle app. "Weird Al" had a better fat suit in 1988. This was just lazy.
The dialogue was awful. Often laughably awful. "Back to back!" Ugh.
So, uh, does Sabretooth suddenly have electrical powers? Seems like lights flickered on and off quite a bit when he was around, for no apparent reason.
Why didn't Wolverine notice that there for all the blood on Kayla, there were no wounds? I guess he's not the best there is at forensics.
Why was Deadpool's mouth fused shut? Shortly before that, they showed him with lips sewn shut, but then suddenly there's scar tissue all over the bottom of his face. I could come up with a No-Prize explanation, but I really shouldn't have to.
One thing the film did that really bothered me was the Boba Fett retcon (the Fettcon?). See, Boba Fett was awesome in "Empire" because he looked really cool and didn't say much and managed to capture Han Solo. He was only marginally more important than the random aliens that populated Mos Eisley and Jabba's palace, but altogether they helped flesh out the universe. Briefly-appearing characters like Boba Fett made the universe feel like it was full of individuals, and that the protagonists weren't the actual focal point of the cosmos. After all, if someone we've never heard of can just swoop in and take out one of the main cast, then maybe they're all that vulnerable; maybe they aren't protected by contractual immortality. But then the Prequels came along, and suddenly Boba Fett isn't just some random badass, he's the son of the prototype badass on whom all the other badasses were based. They went back and changed Fett from just some guy who comes out of nowhere to take out Han Solo into a focal point of the universe, a major part of the cosmic backstory. Doing so might seem like a good idea--fans love Boba Fett, so surely they'll love that he has a more important role, right?--but instead it serves to make the universe seem less vast and well-populated, and it makes the heroes seem far less vulnerable, which kills the suspense. When the same handful of characters keep popping up over and over in the significant events that shape the universe, it starts seeming less like a universe and more like a high school reunion. When the villain taking out the heroes isn't just some faceless guy, but is the faceless guy who was destined from birth to be an amazing yadda yadda, then the heroes don't really have much to fear from the faceless guys after all.

Point being, in the first X-Men movie, Wolverine was just some guy with his own life and his own problems who got swept up into the grand Mutant war and Xavier's team and all that. Eventually he grew into the role, but he did so as our POV character (alongside Rogue). X-Men Origins: Wolverine makes Logan into a key player from the start, who even frees Cyclops, thus paving the way for the X-Men to be created. It's a silly move, made sillier by the fact that apparently no one who escaped from Three Mile Island thanks to Wolverine ever ran into him again at Xavier's.
Speaking of silliness, exactly why would bones appear shiny on an X-Ray?
And as long as I've only recently mentioned Star Wars, young Logan screaming with his little bone claws out is about as intimidating as Anakin Skywalker shouting "yippee!" in "Phantom Menace." Showing badasses as kids is generally a bad idea.
Couldn't they have slashed up Sabretooth's face a bit, to at least provide some explanation for why he would look so different in the first movie?
Why would Adamantium bullets necessarily pierce Adamantium? If I shoot lead bullets at a lead wall, they don't just magically phase through. Sure, it's possible that the sheer force behind the bullets, combined with the fact that they're as hard as Wolverine's skeletal coating, might be enough to break through his head, but then wouldn't he have two big bullet shaped gaps in his skull coating? Besides that, I didn't see his healing brain expel the bullets, nor did I see any exit wounds...so did his brain just grow around the Adamantium bullets? Does he have four gaps in his Adamantium-coated skull?

There's a lot to dislike about "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," and I'm hard-pressed to think of anything there was to like about it. It, um, had Quicksilver in it for a second or two, that was good, right?

Music Fail

2009-03-27T15:09:00.001-07:00

It's no secret to anyone who's known me long enough that I spent the '90s without any discernable taste in music. I've accumulated a lot of shitty albums that generally gather dust in my box of shame. But since we've revived this blog, I thought it'd be fun to do a series of "music Schmusic" posts reexamining those terrible albums in a humorous and snarky fashion: you know, what the internet was made for. To start, I picked a nice low-hanging fruit, the debut album of the Spice Girls, "Spice."

Imagine my shock at discovering that, comparatively, it's not that bad. Don't get me wrong; it's not good, but after years of Britney Spears and Fergie and The Pussycat Dolls, this sounds like fucking Beethoven. There's harmonizing, and singing without pitch modulation and lyrics with subtext--anymore I feel lucky when I hear lyrics with text on Top 40 radio. By any sane metric, it's vapid pop trash to be sure, but it shows some measure of craftsmanship that's greater than what you'd hear on the pop station today. What does it say about our society that even the standards of prepackaged, manufactured soulless pop music have fallen?

All I know is that I'll take "Wannabe" over "Wind it Up" any day.

Fuck you, Rob Zombie

2009-03-16T20:51:00.000-07:00

Rob Zombie's "Halloween" was fucking lousy. Not really awful, just lousy; It was kind of like getting a C+ in your favorite subject. You certainly could have done a lot worse, but you know you wasted an opportunity. Add into the equation the fact that you didn't need to take the class at all -- you elected to -- and there you are. Rob Zombie took a true horror classic -- one that in no way needed to be remade -- and turned it into something resoundingly mediocre.

"But wait," one might say. "Rob Zombie's fucking edgy; horror movies today are made for fucking pussies, so he needed to take you candy asses to school. He made 'Halloween' EXTREME."

Here's the problem with that: A pseudo-Freudian analysis of young Michael Myers is not fucking edgy. Spending 40 goddamn minutes exploring li'l Mike's mommy issues is not scary, it's not extreme, it's fucking stupid. The reason why is quite simple: If you're pure evil, you don't need a fucking reason.

Compare the backstories of the two Michaels: What little we know of the 1977 Michael is shown in the film's first five minutes. He is raised in a well-kept, subruban home, has two normal parents and then one night he slices up his sister just 'cause. 2007's Michael, on the other hand, grows up in Boo fucking Radley's hovel, is neglected by his stripper mother and abused by his alcholic stepfather and starts killing people because ... they're mean to him. You tell me which is more extreme.

But none of my complaints about the remake (and there are many more) were large enough to write them up. This was: Rob Zombie is making a sequel, and he's cast a new actor to play young Michael Myers.

The sequel was obvious. It's a horror movie and it didn't lose money, so it was bound to happen. But another actor playing young Michael Myers? Don't get me wrong, I had no love for that pudgy little chode you case to play him in the last movie, it's just that a new young Michael Myers suggests another flashback-laden examination of Michael's "disturbed" childhood. The announcement that Zombie's wife Sherri Moon Zombie will return as Michael's mother confirms this. EXTREME!

Honest to fucking Christ, Rob, what more is there to tell? Are we going to see the chilling story of how 5-year-old Michael pulled the wings off a fly because he lost at dodgeball? Seriously, continually tinkering with the backstory of an estabalished backstory of a character is not some great, cerebrial storytelling; it's fanfic.

But the best part is the new title: Halloween: The Devil Walks Among Us.

Ho. Lee. Shit.

Just further reminder of what I've always thought: if Milton had put a fifteen chapters at the beginning of Paradise Lost where he delved into Lucifer's bed wetting problems, it would have been way scarrier.

Fuck you, Rob Zombie.

Technology is Scary

2009-02-28T11:46:00.000-08:00

With any new technology of sufficient utility, there comes a sort of window of time, where the technology is popular enough to be almost ubiquitous, but new enough to be largely mysterious. During this window of time, there are typically three types of movie released related to that technology:

The Sci-Fi flick that takes the technology to a natural--albeit futuristic and entirely unrealistic--conclusions and sets some action around it.
The Suspense Thriller that uses the new technology in unrealistic ways to accomplish a fairly straightforward (but fresh and exciting because it's got new technology) suspense plot.
The Horror movie that suggests that the new technology is magical, incomprehensible, and evil.

Take the Internet, for example. In the first category, we have flicks like "The Matrix" and "Hackers;" in the second, "The Net;" and in the third, we have "Fear Dot Com" and its ilk. For video games, we have "The Last Starfighter," "Cloak & Dagger," and "Brainscan" (I think--haven't seen the last one). You get the idea. This phenomenon has led to some of our greatest artistic accomplishments, such as "976-EVIL," "Stay Tuned," and "One Missed Call." Recently we had "Eagle Eye" telling us of the dangers of surveillance technology, "Pulse" warning us of ghosts coming through the Wi-Fi, and the YouTube killer of "Untraceable" (who is still rated lower than Evolution of Dance).

Note that this isn't limited to movies, really. "Twilight Zone" had its share of ghostly telephones, bizarre TVs, and magical radios. Ray Bradbury has said that "Fahrenheit 451" is about how much he hates TV. "Cell" has cell phones killing people with stupid magic powers (I feel justified judging a book I haven't read since Stephen King felt justified writing about technology he's never used). Even Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," as I recall, starts with some descriptions of electrical experiments on dead animals. There's nothing one medium likes more than to decry another medium as evil, which is why we have so many books about how TV rots your brain and so many TV shows about the terrors of video games. Of course, TV Tropes has us covered.

Incidentally, I'd really like to know how far back this trope goes. I know Socrates thought writing would rot the brain, but did he tell stories about how it could steal your identity and make you the target of a trans-Grecian conspiracy? The first things Gutenberg printed on his press were a Bible and some porn, but mightn't the third thing have been a script about how ghosts can come through the movable type?

But there is a limit. Eventually, the time window closes. A tech-horror movie about TV just wouldn't work today. They're omnipresent and nonthreatening. Similarly, it would be ludicrous to make a tech-thriller about the telegraph, since it's woefully obsolete. Once the technology stops being either ubiquitous or new-and-mysterious, movies which hinge on those factors end up looking like the silly products of runaway Ludditism that they are.

So, with all this in mind, how the hell did we end up with "The Ring"? It's undoubtedly a tech-flick of the third type, with ghosts on videotape following the basic tropes of the genre. And yet, it was released in 2002, well into the age of DVDs, when videotapes were letting the door hit them in the copy-protection tab on the way out of our lives. How did that manage to get released, let alone get popular?

The Horrors of Creepshow III

2007-06-02T22:26:00.000-07:00

We thought we were done with this blog. We haven't kept up with it, as you can clearly see. This isn't because we've stopped watching bad movies by any stretch of the imagination. Why, just recently we've watched "Black Christmas" and "Da Hip Hop Witch," both of which were incredibly awful. Especially "Da Hip Hop Witch;" watching Eminem and Ja Rule try to act may in fact be a war crime.

But by this point, we figured the Movies Schmovies blog was dead. We surrendered, recognizing that we simply can't keep up with the geyser of runny celluloid shit that spews forth constantly from Hollywood and associated moviemaking communities. Why Uwe Boll alone puts out more shit than we could possibly stand to stomach. It would take something truly monumentally awful to get us to carry the corpse of this blog out to the Pet Sematary and allow it to resurrect into an evil homicidal killing website.

Enter "Creepshow III." Oh my dear sweet Jesus, "Creepshow III." We watched the first "Creepshow" a few years back, and we endured its crappy, campy tirade of Stephen King-penned EC Comics-inspired horror vignettes. It wasn't particularly horrible, it wasn't particularly funny, and it wasn't particularly concerned with which one we were supposed to think it was. And yet, "Creepshow III" made us long for Stephen King's comparatively subtle and moving performance as an alien plant-infested hick.

There's a certain logic which usually goes into these horror vignette movies. Usually there's some kind of framing sequence that ties the movie together (however loosely), and several short stories which include some kind of ironic twist, humorous observation, or moral message. The creators of "Creepshow III," out of ignorance, malice, or Dadaist aesthetic, have decided to chuck that logic for something far more gut-wrenchingly terrible.

The film opens with one of the worst title sequences we've ever seen, as the 'camera' spins around over a cartoony, completely static drawing of some vaguely odd gypsy. After far too much of this, we cut to a short even-more-poorly-drawn Flash-animated cartoon, clearly intending to follow from the first film's tradition of animated framing sequences. The amazingly intricate plot features a hooded midget of some sort opening a hot dog stand where the hot dogs are made with--get this--real dog. Bum-bum-bum!

And that's the high point of the film. The next vignette opens on a 30-years-young Alice, dressed in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform, talking on a cellular phone as she walks home. Along the way, she calls a pudgy 25-year-old man "nerd" and throws his ball away, complains about teachers, and checks out hot guys. If this were any normal horror vignette, the twist or moral message would revolve around her vanity, her shallowness, or her constant use of the cellular phone. The phone would try to kill her, or she'd get calls from someone who's dead, or maybe she'd turn into a pudgy nerd as per the nerd's revenge.

But this is not a normal horror vignette.

Schoolgirl Woman walks into her house, where her judgmental family is gathered around, calling her too fat, calling her too thin, making fun of her diet, and telling her to wash her hands. So, at this point, if this were a normal horror vignette, the twist or moral would involve personal hygiene, with the girls' hands somehow becoming disgusting or out of control, or it might involve weight loss or weight gain, a la "Thinner" and "Say Cheese and Die II" respectively.

Sadly, there's nothing normal about this film.

Schoolwoman's Dad, who is apparently the world's dumbest detective, is fiddling with a "universal remote." Meanwhile, Schoolgrannie expresses an exasperated wish that she had been adopted. If this were a normal horror vignette, Dad's "universal remote" would turn out to actually control the universe, a la "Click," and we'd find that either Schoolgrannie or the universe changes in response to it. Finally, the film demonstrates a modicum of logic. Hope springs eternal.

So, dad hits some button, the world goes weird, and the family disappears. Alice looks around for them, yells at them for their sudden practical joke, exits, and returns. Suddenly, the previous scene plays over again, with Schoolgrannie walking in and receiving lame criticism from her family...but this time, they're black! Schoolgrannie has stayed the same, though, so it's kind of like a reversal of "Webster," where an apparently affluent black family has adopted an older white woman who dresses like a child. We also see that Alice has developed some sort of boils on her left hand.

This scene plays out once more, when Dad finds the "subtitles" button and turns the family Hispanic. Hilarity! Also, in a plot that continues to be unexplained, Schoolgrannie's hand has further mutated. Some more remote fiddling causes her to run outside, with the mutation spreading to her right leg, and she chases after an effeminate fop of a professor, who doesn't seem to notice her. She enters the professor's house, marvels at the fact that he's getting married, and proceeds to stuff her face with potato chips and a chunk of wedding cake, apparently oblivious to the fact that her hand, leg, and face have taken on the appearance of Pizza the Hutt.

In case you're keeping track, the story has so far addressed her desire to be adopted (as her family changes around her, but remains the same set of judgmental pricks), her constant contact with friends (by leaving her alone in the universe for a minute or two, and by having people ignore her existence), her diet (by having her inexplicably stuff her face), and her vanity (by having her mutate into the Toxic Crusader). What the creators have apparently forgotten, in this mad dash through Alice's vices, is that you really need to just focus on one sin per film, or at least explain what the flying bloody hell is going on. A minor error, to be sure.

So after a pointless scene with a delivery boy, Alice eventually steps through a door in the Professor's house, which leads to a room filled with blinding white light. While it would have made more sense at this point for her to meet the Architect, instead she ends up stepping back into her house, totally cured of her hideous boils. Dad is about to give up on the remote control, but decides to press just one more button. Sadly, it's not the "End this movie" button.

And Alice completes her transmogrification into...I don't know, some kind of melting leper? All I know is that her hammy family is horrified, Alice hobbles outside, and dad grabs his gun from the wicker basket on the stairs, oblivious to the creature's cries of "no, it's me, Alice!" Worst. Detective. Ever.

Alice runs into the Professor, who talks with her about how cool the remote is. Detective Dumbass waves his gun in a totally ineffective manner and tells Professor McFlamey to move away from his elderly blob-daughter. Alice pleads to be turned back into herself, but the Professor makes some cryptic remark about how she already is normal, which we think is supposed to obliquely reference the whole vanity/shallowness thing from before. That much, however, is anything but clear. Detective Dad threatens to shoot, but the Professor stands up and explains that it wasn't a hideous girl-shaped melting monster-blob, but a cute and harmless little white rabbit. "What's its name?" asks the family. "Alice," replies the Professor. "That's a pretty name," says Momtard. Then you turn the page and find a preview of the next Goosebumps book.

I wish. So if you're paying attention, and by God we hope you aren't, they ditched even the most basic semblance of a moralistic plot and went with some sort of half-assed Alice in Wonderland motif, which really doesn't tie anything up at all. As it turns out, the 'twist' in "Creepshow III" is going to be "nothing makes any fucking sense."

Our next piece, which we have deemed "Radio DaDa" tells the tale of a down-on-his-luck security guard, and his diversions: Alcohol, whores and uh...radio. We find our protagonist* upon his return to his rundown flop house, for all appearances, during the busy mid-afternoon hooker run, as the below-health-standards halls are teeming with the apartment's other residents: a pimp and his prostitutes. After receiving an awkward advance from the fugliest chud of a prostitute in the building, our security guard friend retires to his apartment, a surprisingly well-appointed pad completely free of the dingy graffiti and somehow dingier streetwalkers that the apartment's lobby held in spades.

Once inside the apartment, we are offered a study in contrast: A portrait of the artist as an alcoholic, if you will. The Martha Stewart brand drapes show a feminine side, while the empties left laying on the kitchen counters offer a more realistic image of mid-30s, loser security guard. After a few drinks, it's time for some radio! But wouldn't you know, his 1950s radio chooses this very day to stop functioning. Desperate to know the Top 8 and 8, our intrepid hero seeks out the aid of three babbling indigents who seem to run some sort of street corner pawn shop. Intense negotiations follow, which is no small feat, as the tradesmen speak a dialect of English infused with the language of the howler monkey. They agree on $10 for a fancy 1970s transistor model, despite the fact that Walgreens could offer similar prices for a new radio; but this is of little concern to the security guard who tosses a dollar bill at the three indigents and walks off with the radio, leaving the salesmen to reenact the opening scene of "2001: A Space Odyssey".

He takes the ill-gotten gains back home only a few decades late to hear anything interesting on the radio. But, contrary to fine reputation of street side, hobo-run pawn shops, this radio does not work. He's about to throw the device out the window, when the device glows "Tommyknockers" green and emits woman's voice commanding him not to. Like most mid-30s schlubs with a job that pays just enough to live slightly better than his neighbors, but not enough to buy a TV, he does pretty much everything talk radio tells him and keeps the radio.

The radio continues to command him, now addressing him by name, telling him to clean his apartment, dry himself with a towel after showering and not use too much mayonnaise on his sandwich. Soon, the radio is giving him, believe it or not, financial advice (stirring horror, I know), encouraging him to purchase tech stocks and "always diversify". It's like the John Tesh show with sexual overtones.

Throughout all this, of course, the security guard reacts completely nonchalant, School Granny would be proud, as he reacts as if this sort of thing happens all the time, which if you drink as much as he did, might just be the case. Maybe this is why he owns a radio and not a TV, I mean thinking a radio is talking to you is one thing, but having Barney Rubbel talking to you while showing you his cock crosses a line.

A note to potential horror directors, conveying emotions to the audience is important. So perhaps when something creepy happens like, ooh, I don't know, a radio fucking speaking to you by name, you help the audience feel the fear by having the actor express an emotion different from that of picking broccoli from his teeth. But lets face it, chugly fud would do pretty much anything a woman tells him. It's a very Freudian flick, kind of like "My Mother, The Radio."

At this point, we, the audience, can only assume that the impending horror the radio is setting him up for is the burst of the tech bubble, risking the lucrative retirement that part-time security guarding affords one. But this fear is alleviated when the radio reveals her ultimate plan for financial success: the pimp next door keeps $500,000 in a cigar box in the attic of the abandoned building next door. Sound stupid? Not half as stupid as watching the security guard complain about how a fire escape ladder look unsafe, only to willingly climb it after the radio calls him a puss. Or the radio commanding him to kill squirrels on sight (a command which, fortunately, is no more a command than an aborted plot point, and is never addressed again).

Well he finds the money and now he's set for a future of tech stocks and bonds, right? Hell, he's got the kind of money where he could buy a bossy BetaMax. From there, a WebTV wife is the next logical step. But the radio has other plans: Now it's time to start killing anyone who looks at him. But, you know, murder has this strange way of drawing the attention of the police. In this case, however, a sorry attempt to tie vignettes together brings Deputy Dumbass from the first story back into the picture, and, being a clueless motherfucker, the murders remain unsolved. Maybe by the fourth or fifth vignettes, he'll be able to track down a fucking clue.

So money in hand and murders remaining woefully unsolved, it's time to hit the road. But the security guard stops listening to the radio just long enough to allow the scary looking prostitute from his building to run away with him, final proof that any woman can tell him to do anything. So where do a fugly chud, a chugly fud and their talking radio go to hide? Apparently not very far, as the prostitute has to make, requiring a stop in the middle of nowhere. But it's the final stop as the slow as molasses plot suddenly accelerates to ridiculous speed: The radio commands the security guard to kill the prostitute, but seeing a slightly higher likelihood of loosing his virginity to the hooker than to the radio, security man takes a tire iron to his radio/stockbroker. Meanwhile, the prostitute retrieves a gun from the car and shoots the security guard in an attempt to steal his money. But this is thwarted by the pimp, who shoots the prostitute, and rides off into the sunset with the two most valuable items he could find: a box containing $500,000 in cash, and his fly boombox that is now telling him to diversify.

Elvis Costello said it best: "Radio is a sad salvation".

Well that should haunt your dreams for now. And if that doesn't, try this on for size: Parts III, IV and Jesus Christ, V are coming tomorrow.

*I question the role of protagonist, as no one in this film really seems a hero any more than a person the camera simply chooses to follow.

Blast from the Past: 3/24/05

2006-01-28T11:02:00.000-08:00

Here's a classic Movies Schmovies column for you all to enjoy!
This means war...
Originally published in the Augustana Observer March 24, 2005

We enjoyed "Freddy vs. Jason" so much that we thought we would like to see some more "versus" movies (except, of course, "Vampires vs. Zombies").

Michael Myers (Halloween) vs. Chucky (Child's Play)
Well, this one's pretty easy. Chucky did have quite an impressive kill total in the "Child's Play" series, but we do have to readjust this total to reflect the fact that everyone in the "Child's Play" series is mentally handicapped. They have to be, they're getting their asses kicked by a doll, for God's sake. Maybe we should give him more fair competition:
Chucky (Child's Play) vs. Yoda (Star Wars)
Until George Lucas cashed in his freak show ticket to get people to see "Attack of the Clones," we really didn't know whethr Yoda would be a good fighter or not. That scene moved so fast that it's still hard to tell whethr he can fight, or just jump around really fast. However, Yoda's had dozens of action figures, but Chucky's just a doll.
Advantage: Yoda.
Blue kids (The Grudge) vs. Samara (The Ring)
Here's a tough one. We're not really sure that the blue kids from "The Grudge" can actually do anything. They just sneak up behind you and make a really annoying sound. They'd probably be a better match for that crazy frog ringtone or Gargamel from the Smurfs. For that matter, we're not really sure what Samara does either, aside from coming out of your TV. The advantage goes to the blue kids if they're fighting in a room with a ceiling-mounted TV, because then Samara would climb out of it and fall flat on her face, and that would just be funny. If the battleground had satellite TV, Samara might appear pixely or fade in and out during a storm. This one's really a toss-up.

Bread vs. Air Supply
How'd this one get in here? Both suck. Loser: Us.

Satan (South Park) vs. Beelzebot (Futurama)
Both can sing, although Beelzebot has a much better theme song ("Please stop sinning while I'm singing"). Besides, has South Park's Satan ever played in a fiddle contest? Didn't think so. Advantage: Beelzebot.

R.L. Stine vs. Books
We thought this fight appropriate since Stine seems to have a grudge against the written word. For a while he was winning, after all he did have like infinity books.

Hannibal Lecter vs. Emeril Lagasse
Obviously, this would be a cook-off. Hannibal is easily the coolest character in film history, so this one's no contest. Advantage: Hannibal. His secret ingredient? One hint: Bam!

Vanilla Ice vs. Ice-T
Rap battle? Fight? Sewing contest? They all go to Ice-T. Deadly like a poisonous mushroom? Sure, Vanilla, whatever you say. Advantage: Ice-T.

Calvin vs. Hobbes
Like a Don King fight, the outcome of this battle was predetermined. John Calvin would dominate Thomas Hobbes.

Genesis vs. Revelation
This is, of course, Phil Collins' band versus the Book of Revelation. We like Genesis because Revelation is pretty weird sometimes. Then again, Genesis can't dance. Advantage: Revelation.

Come back next week for the ultimate face-off, "Bunny the Vampire Slayer." The Easter Bunny vs. hordes of ravenous undead. We're (egg) dye-ing to review it!

Fantastic Four

2005-07-12T19:27:00.000-07:00

Fantastic Four has problems. Sure, it deviates from the comics, but that's the case in any adaptation. One could harp and nitpick on all the unnecessary changes, but there are sweaty fanboys for that sort of thing. We'll only be nitpicking when it's deserved.

No, Fantastic Four's problems have less to do with how close it is to the source material and more to do with internal consistency. Spoilers ahead, so read at your own risk.

*Let's get it out of the way from the start: Jessica Alba strips twice and is ostensibly naked three times. Can we say "lowest common denominator"? Sure, we get to see Kirsten Dunst's wet t-shirt contest in the Spider-Man movies, but it's during scenes where other things are happening besides THO. If Spidey had said "hey Mary Jane, are you cold?" or "oh, MJ, you have to stand in the rain without a bra! The movie depends on it!" it would be just as bad as Reed Richards' "you have to take your clothes off!" Wow, and she turns visible again at precisely the right time to catch her in her skivvies! T&A is A-OK when it contributes something to the story, or at least when it doesn't take anything away. The Jessica Alba naked scenes are trashy. Trashy takes away from the movie.

*Speaking of which, let's go over that particular sequence of events, shall we?
-Reed, Sue, and Johnny can't get past the police and crowd to help Ben.
-Sue can turn herself (but not her clothing) invisible.
-Reed realizes that Sue can turn invisible to get past the police, thus getting her close to ben. He tells her as much, and she turns invisible and strips down.

What then? Let's say she does get to Ben, what does she do? She can't turn visible again, because she's naked. Is she going to invisibly whisper in his ear that he should calm down? Thankfully, we never have to address this because of the next shot (following the convenient T&A, naturally).

-Reed, Ben, and Sue have gotten past the crowd and Sue is snapping at Reed while putting her clothes back on.

So, what purpose was served by her getting naked and invisible? Clearly the whole group was able to get through, despite the fact that two of them had to remain totally visible. If you feel the need to insert gratuitous T&A into your movie, at least work it in with subtlety, don't base a whole, internally inconsistent scene around Jessica Alba in her underwear.

*Following that scene, the group is dubbed "the Fantastic Four" by the newsmedia. Now, they've seen a rock-man lift a fire truck and a stretchy guy save one of its occupants. They've also seen some guy in a jacket huddle over a girl in an explosion, leaving both inexplicably unharmed, and a small portion of the crowd saw a woman do a striptease and stand near a half-contained explosion. Now, I'll give you that the first two are amazing, even fantastic. But who could have seen what Johnny did without being horribly burned themselves? And who could have really noticed what Sue was doing with her invisible force field? It's a bit of a stretch to say that they would have seen more than two people do fantastic things.

*"What happens to a toad when it gets struck by lightning? Same thing that happens to everything else."
--Storm, "X-Men."
"What happens when rubber is super-heated?"
"What happens when you super-cool rubber?"
--Dr. Doom, "Fantastic Four."
"Chemistry 101, Doom. What happens when you quickly cool superheated metal?"
--Mr. Fantastic, "Fantastic Four."

What happens when Marvel movies don't learn from the worst parts of previous Marvel movies? Same thing that happened to the dialogue in "Fantastic Four."

Incidentally, anyone notice that the writers were also channeling "Ghostbusters" for their dialogue?
"Johnny, go supernova."
"I thought we decided that was a bad thing"
--Reed and Johnny, crossing their streams.

*Oh, and it took three minutes to find out that the surface temperature of the sun is 5780 Kelvin. Another two minutes told me that a supernova can reach temperatures around 3 million Kelvin. Johnny's 4000K temperature might be "almost as hot as the sun," but it's nowhere near the supernova-scale that Reed warns him about. That's sloppy writing and sloppier research. I took one term of Astronomy, and that "fact" stuck out like an orange thumb with a flame hovering over it.

*Sometimes the Thing was shaking the ground with every step. Sometimes he was splitting concrete. Sometimes he was tossed out of a truck, where he landed on a van, and didn't even leave a dent in the hood. Was the continuity editor on a break during these scenes?

*"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." --Anton Chekhov.
"If you establish a to-be-killed character in a leaky garage with lots of puddles and a villain with electric powers, the villain should use the abundant water as a conduit for his electrical act of murder." --Jess, Tom and Jon on "Fantastic Four."

*Speaking of which, if you have a principal character (Ben) make a big brouhaha about how he doesn't want a costume like everyone else, don't show him in the costume-pants in the following scene without at least some explanation.

*Next time you make a Fantastic Four film, keep George Lucas away from the dialogue. "Revenge of the Sith" sounded natural and realistic by comparison. Whether it was Doctor Doom's painful wisecracks or Sue's "That was my nose. These are my lips," or Reed's "I found a gasket from space," the dialogue was almost universally terrible.

The notable exceptions were Johnny and Ben, who pulled their respective characters so well that even the sillier dialogue was believable, because they played it off with a sense of humor. Chris Evans was the perfect Human Torch, and Michael Chiklis, despite the acres of costume, gave a more believable, emotive performance than anyone else in the film.

*Which says something about Jessica "I went to the Keanu Reeves school of acting" Alba. She never really interacted with the other characters, instead choosing to play her lines as if she were reading them to the director for the first time at her screen test. Having an inconsistent, sprayed-on tan that was nearly the same color as her hair, and looking significantly younger than her kid brother didn't help her character's believability.

She also had the "Christmas Jones effect," where we have to suspend our disbelief that a very young looking woman, who never displays any particular intelligence (except when she uses technobabble to sound much smarter than Reed, ostensibly the smartest character in the movie), is a top-level geneticist.

*These costumes are made of unstable molecules, which adapt to what their wearers' bodies need. Oh, but they were also irradiated by the cosmic storm, which is why they can adapt to what our bodies need. One explanation was plenty, thanks.

*Sue, you'll be able to bend light around other objects, not just yourself. Let's not follow up on this, so we can continue to have excuses to show you naked, or show your empty floating clothes.

*Ben's organs are all completely solid! Which is good, because his liquified lung syndrome and gaseous pancreas disease were severely life-threatening, and it was really serendipitous that the cosmic storm would make his organs solid again. Oh, I meant to say that they were all rocky and stuff, but instead it came out stupid.

*Sue's force field "can't hold Dr. Doom's electricity much longer," but it can contain a "supernova" blaze for several minutes.

*Hey, what happens to hot metal when you cool it? Well, considering that the indestructible, stronger-than-diamonds organic metal alloy (just come out and say Adamantium already!) was solid before and you were moving around without any real difficulty, I'd say super-heating it and cooling it back to room temperature would probably just bring it back to the same sort of solidity that it had when it was solid before. I guess it might melt and fuse your joints, but I won't actually explain that, I'll just act like the audience should know that already. Boy, that sure wasn't much of a climax, was it?

*And here's the fanboy nitpicking, the "it was different from the comic book" stuff. Dr. Doom is a rich businessman (who also has some mostly-unexplained connection to the fictional country of Latveria), who is dating (or not, or something) Susan Storm who accompanies the titular Four on their ill-fated trip and begins turning to metal and simultaneously developing electric-based powers. As the metal claims more of his body and his company falls to pieces, he puts on a metal mask (given to him by the people of Latveria, presumably so he'll no longer have to act out those tedious facial expressions) and vows revenge on Reed Richards, who he blames for ruining him.

For those not in the know, Victor Von Doom, ruler of Latveria, was originally a vain college rival of Reed's. An experiment left his face slightly scarred, and he blamed Reed for it. He had a metal mask crafted to hide the scar, but he didn't wait until it cooled to put it on, and it left him scarred far worse than he was initially.

Now, we can understand making changes to the comic story, but those changes should serve a purpose. "Fantastic Four" tried to have Von Doom's backstory both ways, and failed miserably. Furthermore, we've seen the "millionaire businessman super-villain bent on revenge" plot before. In other Marvel movies. Norman "The Green Goblin" Osborn, his son Harry, and the Kingpin, have all walked that path before in the last several years. And, with the possible exception of the Kingpin, they've all done it better.

Doom was poorly cast (as Jon said, the villain shouldn't have the most high-pitched voice in the film), poorly scripted (why was Doom tossing around quips that would have made a Bond villain cringe? "I think I'll get a second opinion," "Call me Doom," and the aforementioned Storm-esque lines among many others), poorly costumed (why change the costume? Doom's costume is regal, this Doom is a power-hungry billionaire, why would he choose a weird trenchcoat over a kingly cape? Furthermore, if they were already making changes, why keep the emotionless mask? McMahon could have easily just done voice-overs for the character after the mask went on, and no one would have noticed. They couldn't make it animatronic and emotive, or at least rubbery and movable?) and poorly conceived (ignoring the anticlimax, the backstory was derivative, and Doom-as-metahuman was unnecessary. As Jon pointed out, the original story was probably changed because villifying vanity goes against the Hollywood grain. Better to have a clichéd villain than one who criticized Hollywood value). A superhero (or team of them) is only as interesting as the villains. Failing in their portrayal of Doom led to an overall failure of the interestingness of the film.

*And as long as we're talking about what's interesting and original, let's bring up "The Incredibles." It's a shame when a Fantastic Four rip-off does the team better than their actual movie, but that's the way it seemed to go. Pixar's masterpiece was filled with interesting uses of elastic powers, invisibility, force-fields, and super-strength, as well as a technologically-based powerless bad guy with a grudge against the principal character. Apparently trying to avoid comparison with the animated film, "F4" changed the nature of the source villain. Furthermore, Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman, whose powers would make them the most obvious subjects of comparison to "The Incredibles," took a backseat to the Thing (who only did a few really interesting and original things with his strength) and the Human Torch (whose powers were only in Pixar's movie briefly). "F4" had a prime opportunity to show up Pixar, but gave it up rather than come up with interesting ways to use elastic powers and invisibility (and no, getting Jessica Alba mostly naked doesn't count as "interesting").

This is not to say that there weren't good things about the movie, far from it. On the subject of originality of powers, I would say that they really wowed me with the Human Torch. The effects were a bit sketchy at times, but they really captured the character's happy-go-lucky nature and how that would come through in his abilities. The scene of him on the slopes was very well done, and I really liked the way he left a Jonny-shaped scorch mark in the billboard. The Thing's inability to control his size and strength was done well too. The writers and director clearly put a large amount of thought into the way Ben and Johnny's powers and relationship would be portrayed. The greatest shame is how that amount of thought was omitted from considerations of Reed, Sue, and Doom. The origin was updated well, and the costumes were given a decent logical explanation (and then, a stupid explanation).

The movie wasn't bad. It was easily better than "Daredevil," and at least on-par with "Hulk," though it seems easy to say that it stands a bit taller than that one as well. The biggest problem with "F4" was all the little problems, most of which could easily have been fixed with better attention to the movie's internal continuity. The devil's in the details, and Lucifer's in the logic. Both of them were casting a dark hex over "Fantastic Four," leaving an unfortunate black spot on a summer that has seen superhero movies near-perfected by "Batman Begins."

Tune in next time when we review Clint Eastwood's classic spaghetti porno, "A Fist-full Dolores."
--Tom & Jon