Sep 30, 2009

Crank 2: High Voltage 2009

I'd like to personally thank Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the directors of Crank High Voltage (aka, Crank 2), for taking the time and effort it obviously took to incorporate as much tits and ass as humanly possible into a movie that has nothing to do with tits and ass whatsoever. 
 
Watching something like Animal House, or Van Wilder, or any National Lampoon movie since 1983, you actually expect tits and ass. and are then completely disappointed when you get the shaft. You expect it and you get jipped when you get like four seconds of the side of some body-double's boob. Sorta like Crank (the first one, that is).  So tits and ass do not make a mediocre movie into an incredible one, but they certainly do take one's mind off the senile fuck that came up with the premise to the sequel here.

I'm thirty-three minutes into this movie and there's more tits and ass in this movie than the last four movies I reviewed, and most of the porn I don't bother finding any pertinence in, combined. There's fucking, there's spanking, there's nudity, there's strippers, there's jiggly juggliness, there's even hookers and mostly naked chicks with guns running amok. In fact, whenever there's something completely mindless and ridiculous going on, count on naked girls to show up with guns. 

But does this make a good movie thus far? I really think this is what the last movie lacked completely. Maybe the directors felt that too much sexuality in the  first movie might have distracted the casual viewer from the fact that Efren Ramirez (Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite) played a cross-dressing freak and that would draw in audiences all on its own. Instead, now Efren plays the freak's brother, who happens to have something the movie refers to (in big bold letters) "Full Body Tourette Syndrome." Apparently one out of every six billion people have it, and it happens that Venus (Ramirez) just happens to show up on a scooter to rescue Chev (Jason Statham) from being arrested by the police. 

There's nothing wrong whatsoever with Jason Statham's acting, either. I really did enjoy his parts in Snatch, The Italian Job, as well as a few others. Although my review of the first Crank movie was a little rough, this one, I think, might come across a bit more respectful.

But before we get there, let's take a look at the premise:

Three months after his supposed death in the first Crank, Eve Lydon (Amy Smart) has begun pole dancing. Completely coincidental, in fact, that Chev happens upon her in a completely random strip club that he just happened to find out about from a hooker that he saved. But no, life would be so easy if it just followed simple laws of physics. Instead of dying, Chev just sort of bounced off a car, landed on the asphalt and was literally shoveled off the pavement and thrown into a van. When he woke up, it was three months later and he had a plastic heart installed into his body while he was still awake by two surgeons who looked vaguely Asian. Of course, he was required to recharge the battery pack that came with the heart (as he found out by someone who's number he happened to know by heart (get it?) and Dr. Miles coincidentally was a heart transplant expert played marvelously by Dwight Yoakam), and when that got screwed up, he looked for someone to mess with for the rest of the movie that might try to electrocute him. A few someone's, in fact.

Make sense yet? Guy broke the battery to his plastic heart, so he has to keep charging his heart up any way he can. Get it?

So here's Chev running amok and plugging himself into anything with electricity. You are probably thinking to yourself "How many ways could the directors possibly defy the laws of physics and yet make it even somewhat believable?"

It turns out three. Getting tazed, fucking and when the EMT used the paddles were the only three activities (the middle one worked because it generated "friction" and gave a great excuse to watch two people go at it on a horse track) that would not actually kill him outright. Just for giggles, let's see how he tries to recharge:

1. Wiring ignition cables to it.
2. Getting a Jump Start using jumper cables and his tongue
3. Getting tazed
4. Electronic Dog Collar
5. Rubbing up against an elderly woman at a horse track
6. Fucking extravagantly on the horse track itself during the race
7. EMT jumping his heart with paddles.
8. Massive electrical transformers (which, then, also transformed the movie into a really awesome king kong versus godzilla (except with mutated characters) sequence which was hysterically funny)

9. Not so massive electricity transformer on top of an electric pole which nonetheless catches his hair and clothing on fire and causes him to hallucinate that he's screwing Eve and not burning the weird asian hooker that he previously saved at the beginning of the movie. 

By the way, GREAT Cameo by Ron Jeremy playing a raucious picketer in the movie. Very cool. And then we had another great cameo by David Carradine (RIP) who played the 100 year old horny Fu-Manchu Asian man  Poon Dong who actually was the recipient of Chev's heart in the first place.

Okay, so we get past all that to the final big finale of tits, ass, guns, knives, nun-chucks, a random head in a fish tank, nude women, fire, electricity, a pool, gorgeous backdrop and hallucinations and the movie finally ends with Dr. Miles transplanting the heart into a burnt wrapped body during the credits. So not sure how this will work out, whether there will be a Crank 3: Fucking for dear life or not, but I'll be sure to watch it.

So here's the break down:

Tits and ass: 9.9. This is officially the best tits and ass movie I have yet to see that Scarlett Johansson wasn't in.

A completely randomly generated number: 5.1

Overall Ridiculousness: 8.5. This movie was just plain ridiculous, but started making fun of itself about half way through, so that was awesome.

Violence: 7.0: There was non-stop violence, but mostly really ridiculous violence (like sawing off one's own nipple) that was just sort of too stupid to be called violence. 

Violins: 0.0. There were no violins of any type in this movie at all.

Fucking: 8.9 Extremely well done, particularly because it's during a horse race on the horse track while horses are jumping over them in front of thousands of people.

Special effects: 8.0: The cutaways were kinda cool, but there weren't all that many noticeable special effects to draw away from the ridiculousness of the movie.

Random cutouts to completely random situations that were just plain funny as all hell: 8.8. This happened often, they were always ridiculous and funny and lent to a better experience.

So overall I rated this movie 7.025, which is pretty damned good. I really couldn't believe a sequel could be better than the first, but this certainly was.

Sep 27, 2009

500 Days of Summer 2009

This was an awkward movie. Picture that one girl you met several years ago, the one that says "we should just be friends" and proves it by fucking you consistently, and leading you on every day toward an end that you know will involve you having the feeling of being shit on by everyone in your life simultaneously.  All while saying, "no really, we're just friends. We shouldn't put a label on this. Honestly, I'm just happy as we are here and now, friends. Wanna fuck?"

Yes, I've been on the receiving end of the Summer (Zooey Deschanel) character. I've been Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) quite a few times in my life. And every single time it's because she had a boyfriend. This movie's no different, really, except the boyfriend doesn't come in until day 460 or so. So at least that lends the character of Summer a tiny bit of credibility. And sure, she was up front in the beginning. First time they talked for more than six seconds, she laid it out (in more ways than one, of course) the way she felt and then proved it by just being as romantic as possible with the shmuck Tom.

And Tom is a shmuck, just like I was, just like you were, just like most nice people are. You might be a shmuck and not even know it. Summer just used Tom until she could find her true love, which, of course, wasn't him. She was practicing. Well good for fucking her.

Let this movie be a beacon. An indicator. If you watch this movie and say "yeah, who needs labels anyway?" then you, my ignoramus dipshit of a reader, are a fucking shmuck.

But aside from that, this was a really well done movie. Usually the skipping from day to day back and forth would aggravate me (much like The Fountain did when I reviewed it) but in this case it was pretty helpful. The scenes skip so you can see where everything was particularly fucked up.

Like for instance, there's a scene where they are in a restaurant. She says "where are we going. what is this?" etc. He says "aren't you happy?" and then a little while into the movie, the same scene, roles reversed, happens in his car. The first one, they are in the process of breaking up, shit sucks, and he has no clue what to do. The second time (which, chronologically is the first time) they are both happy to be a part of each other's life. Stuff like that was pretty cool.

And at the end, of course, just to make this movie rounded out a sappy love flick that's trying not to be a love flick, he gets emotionally mangled by Summer just to bump into a new girl Alison (Rache. Boston). That, of course, worked out great as he poured his soul to her about, guess who? Summer.

Yep, she took that longer than most girls would, but Rachel Boston just literally must of walked off her canceled set of Ex-list onto the set of 500 days of Summer before they shot the scene in the diner, so she wasn't exactly in any rush to go anywhere. She finally smartens up and leaves while he does karoake poorly and drunk, and he bumps into Summer while he's moping at his favorite spot in the park. She's not stalking him, of course. So he tries to get on with his life by going to 10,000 interviews as an architect because that's what he was studying before he wasted several hundred days with Summer. So on the very last interview before he basically has no other place to go, he bumps into a new girl while waiting for the interview. She's interviewing for the same job. Her name is...

wait for it....

Autumn.

Autumn, of course, is the fabulously sexy Minka Kelly who's extensive career thus far includes such renowned movies like Devil's Highway, The Pumkin Karver and... well, this movie. Yeah, I have no idea either, but she's gorgeous.

The particularly interesting thing about the film, the thing that got me, was that the narrator (there's a narrator, and his name is Richard McGonagle, and he's appeared in or done voice-overs for EVERYTHING you've ever seen) actually says at one point "this is not a love story," when, in truth, it was a love story. Like when she said "we should just be friends" and fucked him ass-way-backwards throughout the film.

Alright then. There's my rant of a movie review. Now for some points.

Reality: Horribly bad Karoake done extremely well: 5.4

Tits and Ass: There was absolutely no tits and ass in this movie: 0.1

Masochism: You really like this movie although it hurts like hell to think that the very movie you are watching right this second is actually something you could have written the screenplay for: 7.3

Simulated sex: All sex that appears on your screen, regardless of how real it looks, really is simulated. The shower scene was portrayed rather well, particularly leading up to it parts. 8.1

Visually the movie was very stimulating, shot very well. You can see several shots that really made the film and I was impressed by the overall tone of the movie. 8.2

Aggravated that not only does Zooey look like my ex, but so does the "look-a-like" Kathryn Weisbeck, if not moreso. What, did someone steal my frigging brain for a week? 3.5

That brings us to a total of 5.433. Just a pubic hair over average. I would see it again.

Idiocracy 2006


This work computer is really pissing me off. After a year of using a laptop and getting used to there being a nice little neat touchpad down there in the middle of the keyboard, and having all the keys nice and flat so they don't make noises when you type, I'm lucky I haven't thrown this whole system through a wall yet. ARGH. Which makes writing reviews, by the way, much harder. Fucking shit! I can't even get the stupid spell checker to work on this fucking thing. Argh, I am not in a good place right now.

Well, except for the most ridiculous movie of the year so far, which was Idiocracy. It stars Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph, two people who are stuck together unceremoniously in some weird army experiment. The premise of the movie, is they take two "morons" and stick them in capsules and wake them up a year later.

Well, unfortunately, things go bad somewhere and they wind up being forgotten. 500 years later, in a garbage dump avalanche gone horribly bad (you ever hear of a good avalanche?) Luke Wilson's character winds up in the parlor of Dax Shepard (who's character is a lawyer) while he's taking a dump on his toilet/couch. He freaks out, and goes to a doctor played ingeniously by Justin Long, and winds up in jail for being so smart, basically.

Long story cut way way way...WAAAAAAAAAAY short:

He becomes secretary of the interior. Can you name our secretary of the Interior without looking it up? Exactly. Completely ridiculous eh.

I really don't want to go too much into this one, because although it was funny and very worth my while watching it, I have a splitting headache from laughing so loud at it. I watched the movie right before I watched Eulogy, but I'm still reeling from it.

I'm not going to do my usual breakdown on this one, as it was just too funny to really pay attention to much going on in the film.

So, just this time, go out and rent Idiocracy purely because I told you to. I'll even rate it a random 7.9 for shits and giggles if that makes you feel better about yourself in the morning. It's really really stupid, and that makes it quite funny.

It's especially a good movie to watch if you sit there thinking how bad your life is, and you are completely depressed and stuff.

It's like a paper towel: a quicker picker upper. Yeah.

Eulogy 2004

I've actually seen quite a number of movies over the past couple weeks, but as my computer died on me recently, I've been quite unable to share them with you. So I finally broke into a work computer far enough that it actually plays videos I find online. It's rather dead tonight so I thought I'd share this little gem with you.

If you haven't seen Eulogy yet,  you are certainly missing out on a really fun movie. Technically it's a drama, and there are a lot of serious issues being developed in the story, but really it's a comedy neatly disguised as a drama acting like a comedy laughing at the drama going on in a comedic yet dramatic sort of way. Ish.

The story is simple. Grampa dies and everyone shows up for the funeral, and within seconds you realize no one in the family likes either Grampa or anyone else for that matter, except for the main character Zooey Deschanel who plays Kate Collins, the granddaughter. Apparently she is the only one that liked Grampa. She also narrates the film.

Kelly Preston plays Zooey's lesbian Aunt, who's lesbian feance happens to be none other than Famke Janssen. For those of you who live under a rock, Famke Janssen played Jean Grey in the X-Men movies. And, for those of you who are blind, she's drop dead gorgeous.

Anyways, Ray Romano plays Grampa's son Skip Collins, and he's a divorcee with two sex starved 11 year old boys. How you somehow become sex starved at 11 I have no idea. When I was eleven, I was climbing trees and farting at the next door neighbor's daughter for fun. I wonder what ever happened to that girl...She was so awesome. She liked me. Once she threw an oil filter at my head for no reason at all. It was love at first site. I ripped a tree (it wasn't a big tree, and I was a pretty strong kid at 11) and threw that back at her. I think because it was a couple weeks belated she didn't understand it was retribution for the oil filter thing, so that didn't work too well in the whole "ha, so take that!" department. This went on for days and days until her dog ate her.

Where was I.

Oh yeah, so ya got Kelly Preston and Ray Romano, two very strong actors, and then their sister is played by Debra Winger, who plays a neurotic Alice Collins. Alice is basically the epitome of a (did I already say neurotic?) bad sister; completely judgemental towards Lucy and her lesbian lover (can you just picture Kelly Preston and Famke Janssen triple-tonguing the skin turbans? I can.), who talks so much her husband and kids are literally in fear just thinking about talking.

Rounding out the story is Hank Azaria, another son of Grampa who plays Daniel Collins, who is just brilliant no matter what role he's playing. He plays an obscure adult film star who got his childhood fame by being in some peanut butter commercial. go figure. Hot sticky goo in the face- things just don't change for him apparently.

Regardless. It's a really cute story about how no one really knows what to do and how to react to Grampa being dead, so they just take out all their psychological issues on everyone else in their family.

The whole time you watch the movie, though, all you think about is Kelly Preston and Famke Janssen double-teaming the soft naked enchiladas. No offense, but really. I've literally paid attention to nothing else other than those two and the thoughts of them finding how many licks it takes to get to the center of their vagina pops. I think I have to change my shorts.

But really, things could be worse. Oh, and I just realized that Hank Azaria plays the part of Katey's (Zooey Deschanel) Dad. See, somehow I missed that until just now. Crap.

I think the neatest part of the movie was the cameo by Rene Auberjonois, who was basically famous for playing the part of Odo on Deep Space Nine, among seven  million other tv show appearances. You know he started his career as a voice over on the Jetsons? He was also on the tv show Bensons, which I think he was most famous for, and most recently a role on Boston Legal. Just random filler for this review, basically, but noteworthy nonetheless.

So here's the official countdown:

Thinking of Kelly Preston and Famke Janssen doing the naked bungee noodle slip a dee doo da day- 10.0.

Actually seeing Kelly Preston and Famke Janssen participating in the two-way Indy 69 thousand- 1.0.

Not caring about whether Kelly Preston and Famke Janssen actually do it on screen or not but getting off at the mere thought of it the entire time I watched this movie, thus, missing most of the movie- 10.0

Trying to come up with creative euphamisms for Kelly Preston and Famke Janssen getting it on the lesbian way- 10.0

You know, I really can't stop thinking about Kelly Preston and Famke Janssen lip-locking the fandango buffalo monsters, so I'll throw in another- 10.0

Okay, seriously. This movie was actually very heart warming, and it was awesome to see Debra Winger as a psychotic bitch, but it certainly wasn't anywhere close to as exhilerating as thinking about Kelly Preston and Famke Janssen riding the naked tuna boat to charlieville- 8.0

I really need to stop thinking about Kelly Preston and Famke Janssen. So, in lieu of a reference to lesbian sex, let's concentrate on some other fine aspects of this movie. Like when the two twin hormones freaked out their aunt by ripping into their birthday cake and shaping it like two breasts. That was kinda funny. 5.0

Oh, and when Grampa's wife OD'ed, and they pumped her stomach, Ray Ramano is saying on the phone : "Hey sis, did they puke her? Alright, I'll spread it...Aight, bye...[hangs up phone] She unswallowed."  That was the best puke euphamism of all time. That inspired me to write a love poem about puke a while back. For that line alone, I'll throw in a 7.5

Wishing I was 11 and my aunt was dating a hot lesbian (well, like I said, it wouldn't have really mattered...)- 5

Overall experience- 7

A completely random number I chose because I have to pee-

Which gives this movie a grand total of 7.0.

And just in general, I hope you are not taking 10 to mean "Must See" and 1 to mean "avoid at all costs". It's just a stupid numbering system. I mean, look here, I put 10 this time, and usually I only put 8. I must really be bored.

Mr. Fix-It 2006

So take a wild guess what happens when I send my wife to BockChuster Video to pick up movies? Yep. You guessed right. "Mr. Fix-it." She picked up that and the most recent installment of Desperate Housewives, and Stephen King's Desperation. You think she's trying to tell me something?

I began watching the movie with a hint of skepticism, as it states rather loudly on the cover "...a great date movie." Right off the bat, being a chick flick causes my sphincter to retract, but we won't go there right now.

The main premise of the movie involves a story about this guy who basically charges loser men money to date their ex-girlfriends and show them just how much the women are missing out now that they dumped them. For instance, he dates a girl who wants "Mr. Sensitive" and he becomes a chauvanistic pig. She wants a guy who isn't as jealous as her ex, he makes pretend that he's the most jealous of all people. She wants someone who's considerate, he's an inconsiderate prick. You get the picture.

David Boreanaz, who had roles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Bones to name a couple, plays the part of Lance Valenteen, super hero to loser dumped morons who can't keep their women. Alana De La Garza plays Sophia, the ex girlfriend of a client, who meets Lance when he finds her at a local strip club. By the way Alana De La Garza looks good wearing hardly anything at all. Anyways, these two meet and Lance, under the auspices of being "new in town" somehow sneaks his way into her life by, well, basically stalking her at places her ex-boyfriend points out to Lance.

There's a particularly good scene where the dog he "borrows" from the pound where his buddy works winds up licking other dogs' asses while he's trying to hit on Sophia. I also found it particularly fun to watch the dog "daydream" about Sophia's poodle- dogs walking, chasing toys, having a picnic, fucking in the moonlight...it was really romantic. I can see why this is such a good date movie.

Oh, and with all this going on, Lance is hoping that by selling this service, he is able to fix up his beater of a camaro and compete in a street racing competition. Kinda juvenile plot. Speaking of plots.

Tobias, Ronald B. wrote "20 Master Plots." (Cincinnati: Writer's Digest Books, 1993) and in this book described them as:

   1. Quest
   2. Adventure
   3. Pursuit
   4. Rescue
   5. Escape
   6. Revenge
   7. The Riddle
   8. Rivalry
   9. Underdog
  10. Temptation
  11. Metamorphosis
  12. Transformation
  13. Maturation
  14. Love
  15. Forbidden Love
  16. Sacrifice
  17. Discovery
  18. Wretched Excess
  19. Ascension
  20. Descension.

Obviously this was written in 1993, which was a while back, so the author forgot a few that happen to coincide with this movie's review.

21. Visual Masturbation
22. Chick Flick
23. Completely ridiculously faked Italian Accents by real Italian actresses
24. Fucking while completely clothed.
25. Overused video filters.
26. et al.

Just to name a couple. Pick one. I really have no clue what plot line this followed. I really don't think I want to analyze this too much.

Oh, speaking of Alana De La Garza- watching her have an orgasm while grinding Lance while the dog watches, albeit fully clothed, was fucking weird but weird in a kinda hot kinky nice pretty shiny teeth kinda way. There's something about a girl who has a grinding fetish...

Ah... anyways. This movie has all the makings of a great movie- Adults playing Dodge ball, strippers, girls with curvaceous bodies wearing scant bikinis, amateur race car driving, humping dogs, old guys serenading old women...but it lacks some definite block buster features. Like a gag-real. It should be a law that every single comedy slash cute romantic movie should be required to include a gag real in their special features on the DVD. I actually paid for the rental, and I pay for rentals for the fucking gag reels, especially when the movie is less interesting then picking dry skin scabs off my knuckles from the bitter cold weather we've been having up here lately.

Seriously though. This was a "Watch a cute movie, all the while insulting your girlfriend and every member of the opposite sex unbeknownst to them" movie.

I'd like some pizza. And some beer. And I'd like to tickle my wife's feet just for giggles.

Well, I had fun watching the movie, I hardly fast-forwarded through it at all (with the exception of a very poorly done salsa dance scene) and it was actually kinda cute in some respects. Much like wifey and me. Maybe my wife IS trying to tell me something...

So here's the breakdown.

4.5 for tits and ass; there was about thirty-five seconds of anything even remotely close to tits and ass, and half of that time they were fully clothed.

8.0 for fulfilling my fantasy of watching a somewhat unremarkable Italian actress with kinda nice looking breasts grind someone while wearing designer khakis. Did I tell you I knew a girl who used to grind furniture and anything else she could get her crotch on? Yeah, she was fun. A bit hard to compete with a sofa though...

8.5 for having a really wild kinda weird tear-jerking twist at the end that will improve your chances of getting laid on a first date by 381 percent. Or, if you are married, the chance wifey will do the dishes, cook a steak dinner, and perform fellatio on you like a cheerleader.

5.5 on the weirdness scale; mostly for the humping dog at all the weird moments, but unfortunately there wasn't really all that much weird shit going on. The elderly woman saying to another elderly man "I can't wait to check that dipstick" as a sexual innuendo was a bit disturbing...

2.5 for redundant morals and lessons of life and love. There should have been WAY more sex in this movie.

7.5 for the fact that Alana De La Garza looks almost exactly like Liv Tyler with the right makeup and lighting. She could be her sister. That's worth some points right there.

6.0 Inconsistencies; like why is there some random drunk guy in a bar arguing with Sophia? WTF is that all about? And really, why is it that all the plans Lance makes to get the ex-boyfriends back with the girls work??? You mean he never messes things up ever?

1.0 for utter misogyny; Really I think that is shining a very poor light on women in general. But if your chick likes chauvinist pigs or mysogonyst assholes, and you happen to be a big one, then hey- go for it. I mean, the whole premise of the movie is to demonstrate how utterly stupid these women have to be to go back to their ex-boyfriends in the first place. Don't you think they'd have moved on by now and are able to see through a hacker scam?? Don't you think that they are intelligent enough to figure out a scam a mile away, or empowered enough not to automatically fall back to their ex just because some guy turns out to be worse than their ex??

This brings us to the grand total average of 5.4375, which, believe it or not, is only slightly larger than the average... We'll let that one little bit of info go for today

Shaun of the Dead 2004

So I found Shaun of the Dead online tonight somewhere random. I happened to see it and figured, eh, I don't have enough British humour in my life, so why not.

I asked a couple guys in my office about it, they said it was a spoof on the dawn of the dead movies, and I happen to be an extremely small fan of those movies. What have I got to lose.

Well, it turns out not much. The entire film was laced with many different horror movie devices like weird screetchy sounds, zoomy camera effects and some pretty weird situations; all of which wound up being pretty funny. Not Funny funny, but British humour funny, which, technically, isn't really all that funny if you don't laugh at anything that doesn't involve farting in most movies.

For the most part, though, the movie was done pretty well. I don't have much to write about it, but as for horror movie spoofs, I guess I'd give this one an overall rating of 6.5. That's a totally random nonsensical number I just figured I'd throw out there; much like this movie's attempt at making death, blood, gore, zombies, and killing your own mother...funny. Woo hoo!!!

No really, see this one. It was fun to watch.

The Fountain 2006


Very interesting concept. But before I go there, I have to say something. I love almost every movie Hugh Jackman has been in, except for maybe Van Helsing. That kinda sucked. Sword Fish was somewhat tolerable mostly because he was in it. And, even though this movie sucked ass horribly, I do have to admit that Jackman played his role superbly. This movie could have sucked ass way more had someone of less talent taken the lead role.

You know Hugh's been acting since 1994? That's over 13 years he's been acting now. It only took him six years to land the role of his life as Logan (Wolverine) in the X-Men franchise. So half of his acting career he's been holy shit famous. Ain't that a hoot?

Anyways, I'm going to watch this movie now and come back on later and finish my review. I probably won't finish it in the next 45 minutes before I leave for home, mostly because I don't think I'll be fast forwarding through this one.

(continued)

Okay, it took me a couple days to watch it a couple more times, because honestly, it's a great movie about...I have no fucking clue. Darren Aronofsky is the director of this film. He was made mediocre by his attempt at film in 1998 with a completly obscure film called "Pi" which no one saw at all. In fact, you can still find a perfectly brand new rental copy of it at your local CockBuster Video store if you look hard enough. Not a scratch and the movies been in rental since 1998 or so.

But I haven't got a single clue what The Fountain is about. Literally. I kinda got the idea that it's about some guy who finds the tree of life and stabs it and drinks from it's milky sap and turns into a plant.

But you don't get that till the last 10 minutes.

The rest of the film is caught somewhere between the invasion of south america by the conquistadors in the 1500's and present. Jackman happens to be one of them, and modern day where Jackman is some sort of doctor who experiments on animals finding cures for diseases etc. We all assume he just lived that long to be here five hundred years later, but I really don't know for sure if that's what happened. Then while those two magnificently boring plots are taking place in the movie, we switch back to Jackman as some bald headed Harikrishna who is bent on fucking this poor tree till it's dead. For dramatic affect, he is surrounded by really bad effects.

And to make matters just more interestingly confusing, It seems they are all taking place at the same time and Rachel Weisz is somehow involved. Rachel Weisz played the Angela Dodson/Isabel Dodson in Constantine, and most recently starred in the Box Office Flop Eragon as Saphira. You might also remember her as the extremely gorgeous Evelyn Carnahan in the Mummy series (The Mummy, 1999 and The Mummy Returns, 2001).

I was at a loss to really understand the movie as it was a bit choppy, and the fact that there were basically three plots going on at the same time with no end or middle or beginning to any of them, but I bet if I watch it about another 100 times I might pick up some subtle plot points that I might have missed the first two times I saw it over the last couple days.

I didn't even fast forward through it, and I still didn't get most of it.

I feel so unintellectual now.

So, here are the results:

Tits and Ass, 0.0. There are no tits or ass of any kind in this movie.

A clue, 0.0. As in, I kinda like to have some fucking clue as to what the fuck I just saw, and I really fucking don't have one.

Satisfying my fantasy of watching some guy's wife die, but maybe she really didn't die, and hey, is he dead anyways, no wait, is he alive? 5.5.

Special effects, 2.0. It reminded me of movies made in the fifties with guys in scuba gear growling and tearing apart plastic submarines in the director's pool.

Getting the feeling that Darren Aronofsky is on some serious crack, 8.5

Watching a movie to "experience it" regardless of plot line or dialogue, 1.0.

Violence, fight scenes, etc, 2.0. Not too much gore, which is good, but in this movie, just makes it worse. At least some gore would have made it more interesting.

Holding my breath to see if  they could get Rachel Weisz naked, 0.0.

Which leaves us with a small movie case vibrating on the floor in fright with a rating of 2.125, which also happens to be my all time lowest rating for any movie except for one.  Mel Gibson's Apocalypto wasn't rated at all, mostly because I only use a scale of 0 to 10 and I never reviewed it.

Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny 2006

I stumbled upon the Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny movie online somewhere. Can't recall where exactly. I'm really glad there are shitty copies of shitty movies on the internet, else I'd actually spend money renting them and thus waste my time watching them in the full hi-fi hi-def version that the director intended when they wasted the hundreds of thousands of dollars it took to make movies such as this. 

I have to admit, I was in a pretty good mood. I found Star Wars parts 1 and 2 as well as Cruel Intentions (a classic!) all online to view. Of course, mind you, no online version will ever come even remotely close to DVD quality, but you can definitely get the picture (no pun intended).

The one good factor about this movie is the fact that Meatloaf is in it. Typically, any movie whatsoever (like Fight Club, for instance) where Meatloaf plays any role, that movie is a fucking great movie. I would consider this Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny movie to be atypical in that respect as it sucked the dirtiest part of a dog's ass.

I saw Nacho Libre recently, and was a little tipsy so it was kinda fun to watch, but sober and working, anything with Jack Black in it is kinda boring. Again, there are exceptions to every rule, and King Kong was that exception: it was awesome; even with Jack Black playing a lead role.

I like Jack Black; when he finds Sasquatch during the mushroom scene, it's actually pretty funny. What's even more redeeming is that Jack Black starred on Yo Gabba Gabba and Sesame Street and was actually pretty damn cool.


Absurdity, 10

Extremely bad singing, 1.0

Extremely bad acting, 1.0

Extremely bad music, 1.0

Unbelievably bad overall feeling like I just wet myself, 1.0

Living vicariously through another fat person and their bad singing/songwriting, 3.5

Tits and Ass, 0.0, are we in grade school or what?

Having a Bong of Destiny at the end, 9.0

Bong of destiny or no bong of destiny at the end, it doesn't help this paltry rating of 3.3 for this movie. 

Whether it be my general mood today, or the fact that I've gotten about four hours of sleep in the past three days, I can't say I really enjoyed this movie. I absolutely love and respect Jack Black, but this movie just didn't do it for me at all. Maybe someday I'll do another review after watching it again.