GI JOE retaliation

For one, Hasbro should change their logo because it looks really dumb when it comes up on screen.
For the unitnitiated, this is a sequel to a movie starring my boy Tatum when he was still considered, ‘a boring good looking guy’, i.e. pre 21 jumpstreet and Magic Mike.  He wasn’t actually boring, that’s just something all goodlooking people have to deal with because they have better jeans than everyone else and are probably smarter than all the ugly people too.  Tatum is a genius, Stop Loss was great, best poster of the 21st century, see?

So for the sequel, based on the popular but incredibly stupid toy line (doesn’t stop me from buying em), they killed of my boy Tatum to replace him with The Rock. They gave him an anticlimactic death in the first scene…
THEN… Magic Mike went off all up in middle aged women’s panties, so they were like, oh crap we gotta get Per’s boy in there. Get tatum some screen time. So they postpone the release and send it in for reshoots. They still have to kill him, but they insert all these pointless scenes with my boy tatum hanging out with little girls.
one thing: props to my boy tatum because he knew it was bullshit so he is channeling his ‘funny or die’ persona… that is, he’s just being really silly the whole time before he dies and it doesn’t fit, but it’s awesome. best part of the movie.

wait, second best part. the best part is my boy Lee Byung-Hun as Stormshadow. My boy Byung-hun was the star of the best movie of 2011 or someyear like that: I SAW THE DEVIL. This guy is a total international movie star badass. He is currently hailed as Asia’s best actor. So it’s funny that in Hollywood he just gets a bit part in a bad movie, basically. I’m rooting for him because he’s taking a different path that Jackie Chan or Jean Claude, who went to Hollywood to get lead roles in bad movies. It’s because he knows martial arts, but this guy can act up a storm, eastern style. Aint’ no Old Deniro ‘grace in subtlety’ bullshit here.

On some level the filmmakers must have known the ace they had with my boy Byung-Hun, because they do write him some juicy melodrama, which he knocks out of the park.

The final and third good thing this movie does is separate it’s heroes, so they are acting independently of each other and helping each other out when they can, it has the effect of beefing up the mythology.

and there is one scene that is so bad it’s good about war room nuclear political conflict self parody, like the scene could be a monty python skit. so four good things…

other than that this is a really really boring movie, zero intrigue/mystery, minimal suspense… those are the two things you can do to be classically entertaining, right? I don’t recommend it. I recommend a Korean tv show called IRIS starring my boy byung-hun, magic mike, and monty python.

The Bilbo

The Bilbo is barely a movie.  The following is a review designed to be the opposite of my nemesis Peter Travers’ review, as he was successful in writing the worst review possible.  the first 45 minutes were chill and cool, reminded me of The Dirty Dozen, the best part, but then it gets really really stupid.  once all the stupid Bilbo movies come out maybe topher grace will cut an edit that makes the whole thing 80 minutes and good (like he did for the redundant star wars prequels)

Ian Mckellan as gandolff is channeling a specific Dumbledore from the first two harry potter movies, the one that died halfway through the filming so they had to recast him.  at least Jackson had the foresight to shoot all three of the Bilbo movies at once in case sir ian bit the dust like he is definitely gonna do.

The Bilbo is the clearest sign that I have been able to find that movies might be done for good, when crap makes money, that’s when you should get scared… it started with that stupid Pandora movie made by the dumbest man alive, James Cameron.  I shouldn’t rip on something so harshly without explaining…

I have many complaints about the Bilbo but the main one is… where’s all the brokeback mountain stuff from the other movies?  that shit was hilarious.  they do hint at gandolf being a pedo but that’s about it.

good people can be blinded by fandom.  let me give a shout out to the ONE GOOD movie of the whole Tolkien shenanagins: The Fellowship of the Ring.  That movie is truly a good movie.  It employs actual storytelling and genre elements (horror) with tactful, limited use of cgi.  The second Frodo steps out of the shire he is in serious danger.  The one ace that the Fellowship holds, Gandolf, gets taken out of the picture… it’s basically Deliverance except Sir Ian is Burt and the pig butt fucking scene is Elijah Woods face.

The Bilbo is not like deliverance at all.  there is no butt rape, no burt… instead there’s hackneyed contrivances and deus ex machine ‘painted ourselves into a corner so lets just have gandolf cast a spell to save us… there’s also lots of winks to the audience like, ‘remember when we did this in that other stupid middle earth trilogy? wasn’t that cool? let’s do it again.’  I was cringing when they might even have gandolf say, ‘you shall not pass!’ one more time, you can imagine how stupid that would be but they literally do stuff like that through the whole movie.

i’m worried my comparison to the dirty dozen might hint at actual  praise… let’s consider, both movies are men on a mission, about 12 in number (I think the Bilbo might feature 15 total, not sure)… but if the dirty dozen was like the Bilbo it would a. suck,  b. not even get close to the actual mission, just tons of filler crap, c. rely heavily on references to older, better movies, and d. lee marvin would be super old and cast retarded old hat spells to save his men all the time from action with not stakes or motivation.

And what’s with all the praise on golem?  Golem is an idiot.

that is all.

Oscars 2012 (2013)

Seth Macfarlane hosted this years Oscars.  There was kind of a big backlash, I think the twitterverse and such might be speeding up the cultural pedulum that dictates what hipsters like at any given moment (did you know hipsters like sports now?).  But SethMacF was on top of the world after Ted, and it was a big deal when he was announced as the new Oscars host, and This is 40 from Judd Apatow, a movie about rich people made by rich people for rich people, tanked hard at the box office because it was really bad.  This made Ted look even better.  Macfarlane is kind of the new better, more in-touch Judd Apatow (we’ll see how long that lasts)… but then that pendulum started to swing back.

So then he did the show, hosted it… THEN a bunch of bloggers ate him alive… THEN hundreds of thousands of comments on these blogs ate the bloggers alive.  That cultural pendulum isn’t even swining anymore, it’s vibrating.

One of the big complaints was sexism, mostly from psuedo feminists i.e. ‘defenders of good taste’.  D.O.G.T.’s are people, male and female, who get PAID to be gender and/or racially conscious or whatever, so they have to do it all the time come hell or high water, so some of what they say is filler bullshit.  Like the 24 hour news networks, they have to find news so not all the news they find is worthy.  for example: ‘free speech isn’t the greatest thing ever’ sentiment is common among DOGT’s.  They have the thesis before they even go into the research, and end up filtering evidence to support their thesis.  This is bad detective work, it should be done the other way around.  but they can’t change their thesis because then they won’t get PAID.  This could be why there was such a big backlash against the backlash, focused on the bloggers who fancy themselves tasteful.  the solution to this problem, the problem being: if people are paid to get worked up about stuff, then everyones getting worked up and pretty soon we have too much stuff worked up… the solution is BEER, at least for me.

MacF told a joke something like, ‘daniel day lewis really embodied lincoln, but truthfully, no actor has got more inside lincolns head than john wilks boothe’… that joke is hilarious but everyone groaned, so MacF said, ‘jeez, 150 years and it’s still too soon?”  that’s a really good double joke, even a triple joke if you count how it’s actually pretty clever because john wilkes booth actually was an actor.  that joke was cited as one of the more tasteless of the night.  but lincolns been getting his dick sucked a bit too much lately, we have him killing vampires, we compare him to Obama, he should get roasted and he should be a good sport about it.  The lincoln movie in question, LINCOLN, is basically white folk patting themselves on the back about freeing the slaves, it’s kinda stupid.  I’ll take Django, thank you very much.

Sock Puppet reinactment of Flight was pretty great too.  Black sock, etc.

final point: Tarantino won his second oscar, both for scriptwriting.  A lot of people are discussing his filmography, ranking it, etc.  They say, “what do you think his best movie is?”  To them I say, “You compare a Quentin Tarantino movie… to EVERY movie ever made, wasn’t made by Quentin Tarantino.”  (see what I did there was lift a quote from Kill Bill about the Hatori Hanzo sword).

double final point: Ben Affleck won for best picture, or Argo won I should say.  And he was infamously snubbed by the academy for a best director nod, so there were some politics, maybe some guilt, involved in awarding him the best picture.  Which is all kind of moot because Argo was kind of a dumb movie anyway.  However, his acceptance speech was one of the more charming of the night, but i must say… the guys an actor, you can’t trust him.  I’m pretty sure he designed and executed his speech in such a way as to get the most empathy from viewers.  He played us all and pretty soon he’s gonna dominate the world and we will all regret saying, ‘that ben affleck ain’t so bad, his oscar acceptance speech was really charming and cute.’

The oscars this year were pretty good because I sat through the whole thing… but the musical stuff was lame and padded the some say too long running time.  And of course, i was shit faced so i could have sat through a congress hearing and been entertained so what do i know.

Warm Bodies has a double meaning

I will pretty much watch anything with male and female hotties that give me chub.  My nemesis Peter Travers goes so far as to even compare Warm Bodies with the Twilight formula, hes not wrong… just retarded.  RETIRE! RETIRE!

The zombie curve has gone on enough that the only way to tackle it is the ‘revisionist’ angle.  Zombies have even gotten so ‘popular’ (they are often cited on dating sites as an initial compatability test, because zombie lovers love to bone each other)  that the OG zombie purists who were here from the start can get bitter.  I admit it’s something super trivial to take pride in but what else do we have?  Gotta hang your identity on some kind of hook and the zombie hook is just as good as any, if only the movies and books and videogames and tv shows were actually good…  BUT, the traditional zombie movie has already been perfected and imitated so now filmmakers are playing with the rules and possibilities of the genre.  We have entered that annoying self aware post modern stage, supposedly you have to be smart to deal with this kind of art, campbell soup and shit.  Well I’m smarter than your average zombie and I prefer ignorance.  zombie purists might complain that warm bodies changes too much of the ‘zombie rules’ to fit into it’s stupid little plot.  But they forget the solution to this problem: ignorance.  ignorance solves everything.

Warm bodies goes so far as to propose a cure.  not a cure to ignorance (which hopefully will never be cured) but a cure to the whole zombie thing, i mean.  We get to see the recovery stage, something most zombie lore stears clear of because recovery in general is not as entertaining as a depraved slip to rock bottom.

I’m impressed they could even pull it off in the slightest.  It’s kind of a lame idea ‘zombie rom com by way of twilight: the cure to zombies is love’, not strong enough to develop in a TV show or a miniseries.  If it was a book it would probably be a short story, with a sweet but dumb little punchline, possibly written by a middle schooler?  This stupid, stupid idea is perfect for the feature film format, though… because movies are kinda stupid in general too if you think about it.  I haven’t seen a good movie since INCEPTION, and that movie was fucking stupid.  The last good zombie movie was Sean of the Dead, and Warm bodies could be better…

I was about to proclaim warm bodies one of the all time great movies of all time, but then i remembered Edward Scissorhands, Warm Bodies channels that shit quite a bit, and Scissorhands is better.  I hope warm bodies is remembered, though.  Because it’s a shining example of just how stupid hollywood can get, but if they do it right against all odds, in this case with some good emotional beats and jokes, I am endlessly entertained.  and if they cast beautiful people i get chub.

Pitch Perfect Imitates Art and Clint

A lot of people rent pitch perfect on accident because they think it’s that one baseball movie… the one with clint eastwood in it.  Jokes on them because everyone knows Clint Eastwood can’t play baseball for shit because he’s a retard.

Like all good shitty art, Pitch Perfect gave me an Idea.  Fatness is a well known ingredient for classic comedy gold… one observation I’ll make is that all the male fatties are dead, not that I prefer my fatties male, I’m just building towards a point.  I’m referring especially to that one really funny fat guy who died and is now really legendary… Lou Costello.  Pitch Perfect had a really funny and cool fat girl in it, just like in Bridesmaids.  Thank god they are alive and well, god bless.  I think Hollywood pressures the fatties to stay fat, and that’s why my boy Brando bit the dust awhile back, though.  My idea was Fat Camp 2, Battle of the Sexes.  the women would win because the male fatties would all bite the dust.

Pitch Perfect is pretty good and funny if you close your eyes and plug your ears.  The only problem with it is it’s not as funny as Precious.  And ultimately, it’s the kind of movie that attracts people like my nemesis, Peter Travers, so I tend to steer clear.  Anna Kendrick is my boy, though.

Clint Eastwood is stupid.

Robin Hood on the Richter Scale

the richter scale is a way to find books accurately in a library, dewy decimal system is for earthquakes. each dewey is ten times more powerful than the dewey before it, so it is with Robin Hood. I will now rank the robin hoods as though they were dewey earthquakes.
1. The Robin Hood with Errol Flyn from 1938 gets a 10 on the richter scale because it was a force of nature that changed the worlds, just like a big earthquake would do. It made Errol Flynn himself almost as Legendary as Robin Hood! I think the legend goes he was a bisexual pirate who kidnapped James Dean and that’s where the term ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ comes from. This is a wonderful, wonderful movie.
2. And it’s 10 times better than the Disney Robin hood from 1973… But the Disney Robin Hood is still good, still a force to be reckoned with. Do you see how the dewey richter robin scale works? This Robin hood would then get a ’9′ on the scale.
3. Prince of Thieves, from the Genius Kevin Costner, gets an ’8′, it’s 10 times worse than the Disney robin hood, 100 times worse than the Errol Flynn one, but it’s still not terrible and actually 10 and 100 times better than several other Robin Hood movies.
4. Then there’s the Sean Connery one from 1978 or something, gets a 7.
5. Then there’s the Uma Thurman one from the same year as the Genius Kevin Kostner’s version.
6. Then theirs the Ridley Scott one starring Russel Crowe, gets a five. Now were in territory where the earthquake doesn’t do much. By my math that makes Errol Flynn about 100,000 times better than this piece of trash movie! Wow this is good way to compare movies because you don’t accidentally rank a horrible movie and a good movie very closely at all.

One interesting thing with the robin hood legend is how each movie deals with the King Richard cunnundrum, that being: If robin loves King Richard so much, that’s fine I guess but King Richard went on the crusades and commited genocide, he kinda sucked. what did Robin think of that? They all dealt with it differently and it’s interesting so I will list.

1. Errol Flynn chastises Richard for leaving his Kingdom under the protection of Outlaws and critiques the crusades as pointless. Richard smirks at this.
2. Disney Robin hood refers briefly to an unshown episode where Sir Hiss, a snake, hypnotizes Richard to send him on the crusades and get him out of the picture so he and Prince John can take over.
3. The Genius Kevin Costner doesn’t really deal with this problem at all, like a badass. he just casts Sean Connery as King Richard.
4. Sean Connery doesn’t really like Richard but follows him out of a sense of duty to his king, it’s kind of cool.
5. Uma Thurman’s Robin never went on the crusades and doesn’t give a shit, and has a moustache.
6. I don’t remember what happens in the Ridley Scott Russel Crowe one because it was just freaking horrible.

there are other robin hood movies out there i’m sure, but who cares?

The Six

some people do ‘best of the year’ lists, some do ‘worst of the year’ lists. some just do lists: the six
1. Battleship – best not-good movie of the year. it is soooooo good-not-great. it’s the best, it’s great.
2. Snow White and the Huntsman/ Prometheus - slit your wrists rather than exist in a world with a movies like this.
3. total Recall – gonna make movie cynics out of all of us if they keep making stuff like this, a movie that even casual filmgoers can poo poo their nose at.
4. People like us – it’s alex Kurtzman’s first movie as a director. he wrote ‘cowboys and aliens’ and as such is the man I hate most besides Peter Travers and is clearly my nemesis. I boycotted this movie but i’m sure it sucked balls.
5. The Tall Man – kind of like ‘people like us’, this movie is all about how rich people are better than poor people and Hollywood knows best. of course, rich people ARENT better than poor people and Hollywood DOESNT know best. I could see this movie inspiring a slew of riots and genocidal revolutions, it’s good nobody watched it.

that’s all I got, I know I promised six but who cares, really? not me.

movies that I remain indifferent to and may or may not have seen or not seen:

Dark Knight Rises, Avengers

The actual best movie I saw this year is an old Japanese one from 1966 called Tokyo Drifter, but I saw it after Jan 1st so who knows if it counts, not me.