So Bsuy That I Don't Even Have Time Spell the Word "Busy"

Just as I'm getting some people to actually read all this stuff I get too busy at work to do an update. Oh well, on Saturday I'll hopefully have either a review of Semi-Pro or a deeper look at American remakes of Japanese horror films, maybe both. See you all then.

STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT!!!

Please oh please, Hollywood, please stop making American versions Japanese horror films.

Ok, that oughta do it. Thanks, Hollywood.

College Road Trip...TO HELL!!!!

Recently, I did something that a movie critic is not supposed to do, I reviewed a movie I hadn't seen. That movie was Larry the Cable Guy's new movie Witless Protection. Despite the fact that I committed what is normally considered to be some sort of journalistic mortal sin, I feel that future generations will not only vindicate me for what I did but actually put actually worship me as a national hero. Parents will name their children after me for warning them to stay the hell away from a movie that scored ZERO PERCENT on RottenTomatoes.com's Tomato Meter.

I speak now not only to my current readers but also to little Michael Clear Nussbaum in the year 2030 who's writing a school report about me and needs more than just the Witless Protection article to work with. Therefore, I will now make the case for why you all should never, ever see College Road Trip.

This won't be as easy a call like Witless was. Movies can surprise you in ways that are very...um...surprising.* I can remember seeing the trailer for Pulp Fiction and thinking it was going to be something like what retarded people would make if they ever broke into a movie studio and shot their own picture. Instead, it turned out to be on of the 20th century's great movies. On the other hand, I thought Snakes On A Plane would be a highly entertaining action film and it was instead fiercely mediocre.

So, why do I think that College Road Trip won't be one of these surprises? Let's review the evidence.

First, there's the trailer. Yeah yeah, I know I just talked about how much I didn't like Pulp Fiction's trailer but that was a complex tapestry of a film. A trailer takes some of the movie's best moments and splices them together and Pulp Fiction's best moments were difficult to appreciate when taken out of context from the rest of the film. Go ahead and watch College road Trip's trailer and see if you think that's the case here:



What did we see? First, we see that Martin Lawrence plays a mind bogglingly stupid police chief with some sort of pig phobia who seems shocked that his 18 year old daughter would want to go to college far away instead of what I assume whatever sort of agricultural community college that his small town offers. He's one of these TV/movie dads who's so insanely overprotective of his teenage daughter's virtue that he thinks it's a good idea to abuse the power of his office by tasing a young man who tries to get her a drink. Apparently he's not brought up on charges or sued since he's still driving his police vehicle when he decides to piss his daughter off by accompanying her on a series of college tours or, more specifically a (drumroll) COLLEGE ROAD TRIP. This is the point at which hilarity has supposedly been procured and the film makers attempt to set it free so that it may ensue. Unfortunately, hilarity is an unpredictable beast and in this case it not only fails to ensue but actually desues. My spell checker just told me that "desues" is not a word but, thanks to me, it will be commonly used by my fans in 2030.

Continuing with the trailer, apparently Lawrence's character has never before spent any sort of extended length of time with another human being since he thinks that playing I Spy and singing Bingo will be sufficient to keep the daughter who already resents him for coming along on this trip entertained. After acting like an ass and rolling his SUV down a hill, he and his daughter as well as his son and their pet pig (don't know how the hell they got there, don't care) bum a ride with a man played by Donny Osmond who provides the only laugh in the entire trailer. Lawrence's character possesses no self awareness since he is now visibly annoyed by Osmond's dull attempts at keeping them entertained even though it's similar to what he trying to do with his daughter.

At this point his character is revealed as either schizophrenic or manic depressive since he suddenly does a complete character reversal and whole-heartedly embraces his daughter's decision to move away and go to an out of town college. Since fucking things up and acting like an ass seems to be the only way Lawrence does things, he rushes them both onto a plane to meet what I suppose is some sort of fast-approaching deadline for either a college interview or some sort of submission filing and OH WHO GIVES A CRAP because it's unimportant to the fact that the plane they're on belongs to a skydiving club and they must now jump out of the plane to do whatever the hell it is they have to do. I guess they make it but it turns out that the girl will be staying the night at some sort of a sorority house so Lawrence reverts to his Totally Bugfuck Insane Dad personality who thinks it's a good idea to hide under the beds of strange college girls. Again, the sins he committed earlier in the movie are visited upon him when one of the sorority girls sees the strange, middle aged man hiding in the sorority house and hits him with a taser.

And, well, that's the trailer. It's my main piece of evidence but I do have more. For instance, we have the video diaries that you can see here and here. The first one shows some of the stunts where you get to see a scene not in the trailer where, after parachuting out of the plane, they steal a golf cart which they seem compelled to drive through crowds of people instead of just going to their destination. In the second one, you see some of the supporting cast making lame jokes capped off by Martin Lawrence making a lame joke about doing a sequel.

My final piece of evidence is Martin Lawrence himself. Lawrence simply doesn't make good movies. Looking through his IMDB profile, the only one I'd even come close to recommending is Bad Boys and that is because it's not a Martin Lawrence movie but rather a movie with Martin Lawrence in it. This is the same distinction I made when discussing Larry the Cable Guy and why the only decent movie Larry had been in was Cars. I admit to never having seen Big Momma's House 2 so, hell, maybe that's Lawrence's Citizen Kane and won't be truly appreciated until after he's dead.

So, that's about it. We'll all see on March 7 if I was right. If I'm wrong then I pretty much blow to hell any chance of the future getting cluttered up with all those monuments to me. I have a decent shot of still being alive in 2030 so, if you see an old man walking around with the self satisfied smile that says he did his part to make humanity a better place, that's probably me. Don't say hi though or I'll hit you with my cane.


*(Note to little M.C. Nussbaum in 2030: What I just wrote is a horribly written sentence and you should never write like that. I could go back and change but, here in 2008, we're taught not to acknowledge or correct our mistakes but, rather, to "stay the course" so that sentence stays in. Oh, and don't do drugs.)

My Oscar Predictions

The Academy Awards starts in just a couple of hours. I don't like to do Oscar predictions because I'm usually wrong, but what the hell! Here are my predictions for what will happen tonight:

1. At least two sex symbol young actresses will show up loaded and inadvertently flash their vaginas to the paparazzi.
2. Daniel Day Lewis will be greeted by a crowd of screaming people shaking milkshakes around. When he sees them, he'll say, "Fuck, this is my career from now on, isn't it."
3. Juno star Ellen Page will be described as "adorable" no matter what she's wearing. She could show up wearing a barrel and the runway correspondents would say, "Just like her character in Juno, Ellen Page makes a quirky statement by wearing a barrel yet still manages to look adorable."
4. If Juno doesn't win, chat rooms, forums and MySpace pages all across the internet will immediately proclaim that the Academy members wouldn't know quality if quality stuck its fingers up their asses and gave them all rectal exams.

If I'm right on all 4, everyone reading this must send me 5 dollars.

Suck My Smurf!

There are oh so very many reasons why I'm not looking forward to an upcoming big screen adaptation of The Smurfs but there's one that really stands out. It's not that The Smurfs is a retarded concept that was turned into a soul destroying cartoon several years back. It's not that the soul destroying cartoon had enough fans who actually enjoyed it that the movie could turn into a hit. It's not that the samples of the CGI we've seen so far look lame which gives the movie the potential of being even stupider than the TV show.

No, what I'm really dreading is what I believe that films critics and entertainment reporters will do when speaking of it. I know in my heart that a number close to 100% of them will copy that stupid Smurf gimmick of taking various words when speaking and replacing them with the word Smurf. "It's the Smurfiest Smurf I ever Smurfed," will be a common sight in newspapers and websites. Morning show hosts like Meredith Viera, when introducing voice actors that they're interviewing, will describe them as, "the most positively Smurfy actors working today." If you like it, you'll say it made you feel, "joyfully Smurfy," and if you hated it you'll say it was, "a huge, steaming pile of Smurf." Hell, look at the title of this post. I absolutely hate all that crap yet I couldn't resist doing it myself.

The whole Smurf craze died out years ago and we, as a society, became better for it. Now, I watch as our world once again jumps into the Smurf abyss, quietly weeping because I know what's about to happen. This must be what it's like to be God.

In The Valley of Elah -- It's Not Easy

When In The Valley Of Elah came out last fall, a lot of movie critics went on about how they couldn't figure out the title. I always thought, judging by the commercials, that it was a place in Iraq, but that's not it at all. Now that I've finally seen the movie on DVD, I can tell you that the meaning of the title is very clear, to me at least. It just requires some thought. Not much thought either, but some. That's the problem I think a lot of people have with the movie, It requires some thought.

Elah stars Tommy Lee Jones as Hank Deerfield, a Vietnam veteran who is tortured by the news of his son's disappearance and, eventually, brutal murder shortly after he returned from a tour in Iraq. When the movie didn't do well, many people assumed that its anti-war overtones tanked it at the box office. While that was part of it, the truth is this is a depressing story that does not give its lead character, or the audience, easy answers to the questions about why his son died. A movie like that simply isn't going to pull in the box office take that Transformers does, especially not in this day and age where many people don't feel like being depressed at the movies and will simply wait for the DVD instead. I didn't see it till yesterday on DVD but not because I didn't want to but, rather, because I live in a small town whose local multiplex only has 7 screens. In a case like that, movies like Valley Of Elah will be ignored in order to keep Saw IV and Witless Protection in theaters for another week. This is another reason why the movie didn't do well.

Hank Deerfield was a criminal investigator while in the Army and uses those skills to investigate his son's death. This brings him into contact with the only person who truly sympathizes with him, Police Detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron, looking pretty but not glamorous). She comes to share Hank's passion for solving his son's murder as well as his disgust at the incompetence of the local authorities who did a poor job of initially examining the crime scene and also jumped at the chance to hand the whole investigation off to the military who may be trying to cover up something. At the very least, the military is eager to wrap up the whole unpleasant situation.

Hank enters this investigation with certain assumptions and has to watch helplessly as one assumption after another collapses under the weight of the evidence that he uncovers. The most painful thing for him is how his son, Mike, changed during his time in Iraq. One of the movie's points is that immorality is like an infectious disease, that Nietzsche's warning about not battling with monsters lest you become a monster can be all too true. He also discovers that he's wrong about the ways in which combat veterans would treat their fellow soldiers. Jones does an excellent job of portraying Hank Deerfield as a man whose strength of character gives him the ability to function through the depression that grows with each new piece of information he uncovers. It's a piece of acting that stands out in his illustrious career as he plays a man who manages to let the audience know what he's thinking and feeling even as he tries to repress his emotions.

As I said, there are answers given to the questions asked during the movie, but they are not easily given nor understood. All the data and evidence are presented to you but no Sherlock Holmes type comes out at the end to connect all the dots and explain why so much of what took place happened or why some of the characters did what they did. The characters try to explain but they are unable to fully reveal their motives because even they don't fully understand them. You have to think about all this. You have to use your brain and so many of the people who make movies like Pirates of the Caribbean one of the all time box office champs have no interest in studying the ending and trying to figure out the relevance of a child's simplistic questions or what it means when the contents of a mysterious package that Mike Deerfield sent to his family before he died are revealed. Again, the answers are not simple but they do say something important about human nature and how that impacts this country and the war in Iraq.

The John McCain Conspiracy

I'm sure I don't have to go into the story of the current scandal involving John McCain and a female lobbyist. There is, however, a question that must be answered: How did John McCain make sure that this story came out during a week when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were on vacation? They're off this week since Stewart is hosting the Oscars telecast and thus didn't have time to prepare for that and do his show. Odd thing about that, though. People were really surprised that Stewart got that gig again since most agree that his performance the last time he hosted was somewhat underwhelming. And yet, here we are, there he is, and so it goes.

The only logical, rational explanation is that John McCain knew that the story would break this week so he somehow got the Academy to hire Stewart to host again. How did he do it and, if he's that powerful, why didn't McCain just kill the story altogether? Only someone who's in the tank for McCain would even think that.

If my conspiracy theory gets completely ignored, that will be proof positive that it is true.