Carol Watch

I'm putting together a bookcase today so don't have time to write the review of Eagle Eye I'd planned for today so instead here's a quick rundown on what critics are saying about An American Carol:

So far, they're saying jack and squat. In what I'm sure was an act of negligence, the producers of An American Carol have yet to do advance critic screenings, hence the "N/A" rating on the Tomatometer. This couldn't possibly be because the reason producers always have for not doing advance screenings, that being they think they have a huge pile of crap on their hands. After all, this was made by a guy who made a couple of funny movies two decades ago. That means he's been saving up his creative wad for 20 years so he could blow it on the movie audience of 2008. The only advance screenings done so far have been for right wing bloggers like Ed Morrissey who said this:

When looking at a rough cut, one has to take into consideration the fact that the finished product may look significantly different. From what I saw, the timing will need to get tightened, and some dialogue spaced out better in order to keep laughter from stepping on punch lines. With that said, the movie seemed to go over well enough with the audience, but significant laugh gaps remain, even with an audience as sympathetic as yesterday’s.

Oh well, I'm sure loads of laughs have been squeezed into the movie since that rough cut and the movie will be chock full of comedy goodness by this Friday.

Thank goodness the country will have Beverly Hill Chihuahua to fall back on in the unlikely event that An American Carol stinks.

Things I've Learned From Watching Movies Part 44

Only God, through His prophet Kirk Cameron, can teach you the lame self help book tricks required to save your marriage.

Newman Owns

I've tried and tried but just can't come up with a decent obituary for Paul Newman. You all know what an amazing guy he was and that movies like Hud, The Color of Money and Butch Cassidy made life a little better for us all. So, I'll link to Ebert's memorial and leave it at that. Godspeed, Mr. Newman.

Cry Like Your Sanity Depends On It

I honestly hadn't thought about An American Carol for a while. I had envisioned doing a series of posts about it but a quick search shows that I haven't even mentioned it since September 2. For those of you who don't know, An American Carol is an alleged comedy about a Michael Moore look alike who suffers through a takeoff of A Christmas Carol made by Airplane director David Zucker whose purpose is to make America stay in Iraq until it's the 51st state and change the Constitution before Election Day so George W. Bush can have a 3rd term. For a nice refresher, let's look at the trailer:

Here are the trailer's main points:

1. Michael Moore is fat.
2. No seriously, he's freakin huge.
3. Look, he's eating a donut. Fat guys do stuff like that.
4. He thinks that Cuba has better health care than America does. (Actually, healthcare-wise, we rank #35 in the world while Cuba sits way down the list at a lowly #37. U-S-A, U-S-A.)
5. In some alternate world, Michael Moore owns slaves. Just imagine if Moore actually did real horrible stuff instead of the horrible stuff we make up.
6. Michael Moore hates America so much he wants to abolish the 4th of July. Again, what if he actually did bad stuff like this? Worse yet, how can liberals like a guy who does imaginary bad stuff like this? This proves that liberals are America hating racists.
7. Michael Moore can't tell women from men. Michael Moore is really stupid. And fat.
8. Slapping fat guys who can't fight back is funny.
9. Arab stereotypes are funny here even though they are exactly the same as Arab stereotypes that have been seen in countless other comedy venues.
10. Rosie O'Donnell is fat too.
11. Michael Moore is a perv who would grab a woman's breasts without her knowledge. Man, all these fake situations that we pulled out of our asses and put on the screen really make Michael Moore look bad. Still, he deserves it because he said bad things about President Bush and he wants all Americans to have good, affordable healthcare.
12. The Christmas Carol story model of being visited by 3 ghosts in order to change a person's attitude had been done before approximately 8 billion times. Still, Michael Moore is fat so our version will be funny.
    

Now that we're all caught up, the reason I suddenly thought about An American Carol was the email I received recently from David Zucker. "Golly Mike," you say, "I didn't know you were so tight with the Zuck-meister." I'm not. I got that email along with everyone else who signed up for the movie's mailing list. Previous emails have urged me to become Part Of The Movement by becoming a theater captain. Also, I'm supposed to piss off at least 10 people by dragging them to see the movie. They are also supposed to drag another 10 people each and so on. This leads to the 2 separate emails that have borne Zucker's name. In the first one, he says:

All my Hollywood friends say I'm out of my foolish mind (this being Hollywood, they don't actually say "foolish," but you get the idea.) They were fine when I made people laugh in Airplane!, the Naked Guns, and Scary Movies, but now that I'm making them laugh with a movie that dares to love America and support our troops, they think I should be committed.

All right, first off, I want to know who the hell is saying that the Scary Movies were funny. Zucker took over that franchise with #'s 3 and 4 and did the impossible feat of making the two previous entries made by the Wayans brothers look like pieces of comedy genius. Second, the "love America/support our troops" stuff consists mainly of slapping a fat guy and adding in a scene where the abused, obese man is taken on a tour of the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center by the ghost of George Washington. Ha ha. (I covered all this in a post back in August.

In a second email from Zucker, he tells me this:

AN AMERICAN CAROL is different than AIRPLANE! and my NAKED GUNS and SCARY MOVIES, but even more hilarious.

Dude, Schindler's List had more laughs than the Scary Movies. In the same email, Zucker again makes the claim that he supports the troops. Zucker, of course, "supports the troops" in the typical neocon way, by wanting them to stay in Iraq until they die. They can die of bullet wounds or old age, Zucker would "support" either one.

And that's why I started thinking of An American Carol. Man oh man, is this movie ever gonna suck. I can't wait till Zucker blames the liberal media when it tanks. The sad thing is that I'll probably go see it.If the movie's opening week gross is $10, that'll be my fault.

For The Sake Of The Nation...

In light of the current crisis and the realization that I must focus all my energies to help the American people, I am hereby suspending this blog...oh, screw it. Everyone else on the internet has already done this joke. So, I'll see you all soon.

Written by...EVERYONE

Check out the number of writers that Eagle Eye has. This is not a good sign for the movie. It's a well known guideline that movies with more than 3 writers end up being bad. This movie has 5 and those are the ones we know about. I'd bet a million bucks that a half dozen or so other people had a hand in the script, just not enough to qualify for a screen credit under the rules of the Writer's Guild. Judging by the plot, I'm guessing the script had dumbness problems that a large number of writers couldn't solve. What a shock that a movie from the team of Shia LaBeouf and director D.J. Caruso, the folks who brought you Disturbia, a lame movie saved only by the bikini scenes of brilliant newcomer Sarah Roemer*, would take a script about some all powerful computer hacking terrorist who figured that framing some goob so he would do her bidding would be the perfect way to further her nefarious ends and make it look stupid on film?

There's a vague chance it'll be good. If it is, I'll let you know. If not, I'll let you know that too only phrases like, "Told ya so," and "MUAHAHAHAHA," will be much more prevalent.

* She is called "brilliant" here because she managed to act like she was attracted to Shia LaBeouf's character, a guy who was under house arrest and spent that time leering at her from his bedroom window while she lounged by her pool.

Picking The Low Hanging Fruit

I had fully intended to stop writing about anything related to Dane Cook. I'd have been annoyed had My Best Friend's Girl gotten a blockbuster #1 opening but instead it opened at #3, just barely beating out a crappy cartoon, so my lust for Cook's proverbial head on a metaphorical pike was satisfied. Unfortunately, Cook must have some sort of masochistic love for the things he reads about himself here so he has forced me to write about him again by showing the whole planet that he's a douchebag. Actually, being a douchebag is the nicest thing that this article on TMZ.com says about him. It starts off with an act of douchebaggery and ends with insanity.

It turns out that Mr. Melting Porcelain Vagina Face is so busy finding new inanimate objects to have sex with that he can't be bothered to clean up after his dog. In fact, a judge actually evicted him from his apartment complex because the place was hip deep in dog crap. I'm wondering how much of an exaggeration that is. It says a lot about Cook and his character that he allowed a situation like this to get to the point where his landlord felt he had to evict him. There were almost certainly at least a few warnings given, maybe a note taped to the door saying, "Hey Dane, I know you're busy making that movie where you emotionally abuse Kate Hudson and hey, she deserves it after making Fool's Gold, right? Ha! You can use that. Anyhoo, if you get a minute or two could you maybe find some time to please clean up the massive pile of feces that little Rover has been dumping by the pool? It's just that it's starting to look like that mountain from Close Encounters and the other tenants are starting to complain. Thanks heaps, the Landlord."

So, he gets evicted and needs to come up with a reason why he and his four legged poop machine shouldn't be thrown out. He comes up with what I'm assuming he actually believed was a really good reason:

Cook claims he only rented the apartment in the first place because his heroes, (John) Belushi and (Steve) Martin, used to live in the same complex back in the day, and according to the court docs filed in L.A. County Superior Court, he would suffer serious "mental and emotional" damage -- and his career would crumble -- if he was forced to leave. In the docs, Cook claims, "I know that the presence of those that have lived there before me affects me deeply and provides me with inspiration."

Wow, you mean if he's forced to move we won't see any more movies where he screws a burrito, vomits in public and drops an old woman on the floor? Oh no, I almost forgot we'll also miss out on those comedy specials where he goes on at length about seeing his dad's dick. Also, he's trying to say that truly gifted comedians like John Belushi and Steve Martin share some portion of the blame for all this.

Cook actually said he would pay his landlord $40,000 in compensation for what his dog did which means that Cook must have allowed his dog to leave a LOT of shit lying around. For considerably less he could have hired someone to walk and clean up after his dog but I guess he was too busy getting ready to shoot his next movie which is called...um...huh, he doesn't seem to have any movies currently in the works. Hopefully this means he'll be sitting in his apartment getting high off the smell of dog shit and waiting for the ghost of John Belushi to inspire him to write Piss Boy, the story of a guy who uncontrollably pisses on everything including his potential girlfriend who'll be played by a hot starlet who'll accept the role while drunk on absinthe. Belushi will probably tell him that he should kick the whole "oral sex with non-human things" up a notch and in this movie and do it with something living, like an ostrich or a koala bear. Hell, why not both?