Poop, urine, spit, semen, vomit. Not a big fan. Don't like fart jokes either.

The reason I mention it is that the inclusion of some vomit-based humor is the only thing I have to say against Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
2008
Michael Cera and Kat Dennings
Based on the book by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

I would have said that this is the most unexpected reboot of the The Thin Man franchise I could have imagined, but (a) hardly anyone would get it, and (2) It's not true. Nick and Norah has been at the edge of my radar for a while now, because Amazon thinks it's a book I'm liable to like. And despite the fact that Amazon's collaborative filtering has decided that I'm a teenage heroin-addicted lesbian spy with a cutting fetish, they often cough up entirely reasonable suggestions for books I might like.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that this is far and away the best movie I have seen in a very long time. Now, the last film I got dragged out to the theaters for was The House Bunny (Leah has a friend who was in desperate need of a schlocky feel-good movie. Any movie where the first 200 minutes are set in the Playboy Mansion and filled with playboy bunnies and that's the boring part is not going to fare well with me. Also, they took a sweet old man, one of my personal heroes and made him cry), so I am willing to concede that my judgment might be impaired. But it was just so unspeakably refreshing to watch a movie whose plot doesn't hinge on major characters who we are supposed to care about and respect as people acting so stupid as to imply that they are developmentally challenged (Seriously? You think that murdering your boss by throwing a bus full of screaming children at him is a good way to introduce the public to your new budget-priced weapons platform? I'm looking at you, Obidiah Stane. And no, Harry, the fact that someone was curt with you at lunch doesn't mean that in spite of the evidence of the past six years, all your friends don't care about you and don't trust you.) People act stupid, sure, but they act believably stupid, and even then, that's not what's driving the plot.

Nick and Norah is the story of two young people who are way hipper than you or I will ever be, who pretty much know from the moment they meet that they would go pretty well together, and just have to get their individual acts together so they can get on with that. Which basically means that it's like Questionable Content if Jeph didn't have to keep it going for more than two hours and could just jump straight to the climactic bits. It is also a lot like Go, which is one of my favorite movies, but without the tedious "And now that you've started to care about these characters and situations, let's just change the subject entirely." It also reminds me quite a bit of Adventures in Babysitting for reasons I'm not entirely sure of. Possibly the aspect of it being structured a bit like an Epic -- a sort of Jason and The Argonauts-style Quest Through Interesting Lands Where Most of The Good Bits Are Things Unrelated To The Goal That They Just Happen Upon On The Way, only with teenagers in a big city instead of Greeks in the Aegean.

Anyway, I've complained many times about how movies try to substitute surprise for actual quality. Nick and Norah isn't a movie that hinges on anything being unexpected. I sorted out most of the plot about five to ten minutes in, and it didn't make the movie any worse. As such, "spoilers" may be an inappropriate thing to call the revelations in my detailed analysis. But for those who might be more sensitive to such things, hit the jump...

Continue reading "I don't like jokes based on bodily fluids, excretions, or secretions." »

So close as I can tell, Hollywood doesn't really like doing superhero movies. Back when I reviewed Transformers, and, for that matter, back when I reviewed Knight Rider, I pointed out that the Transformers and KITT both came off more as props than as characters. What Hollywood is interested in is characters and situations, and superheroism is really just a category of special effect. Consider a movie about two former lovers who meet again in the midst of dangerous circumstances, and there's a corporate sellout who is antagonistic. This movie has special effects. Now, if those special effects are a dude in tights flying, the movie is Superman Returns. If the effects are a tornado, it's Twister. Okay, that's not the best example, but you get the idea. Far as Hollywood is concerned, superheroism isn't what the story is about; it's just a framing device for the special effects. (Now, this can be contrasted with the martial arts genre, as I've also seen The Forbidden Kingdom recently. There's a movie where being capable of chi-magic is not simply a prop, but is really what the story is all about. Now, I thought it felt a bit silly, but maybe that's just because I've been trained by Hollywood) They don't want you to think in terms of "It's a movie about a giant monster" or "It's a movie about giant robots" or "It's a show about a talking car." Cloverfield was a movie about young, frightened people surviving a disaster in New York, and it had a giant monster in it. Transformers is a movie about a dorky boy and a hot girl surviving a disaster in middle America, and it has giant robots in it. Knight Rider is a story about a reckless womanizer learning responsibility while protecting a former lover from evil mercenaries, and it's got a talking car in it.

Iron Man is a story about a hard-drinking, womanizing arms-manufacturer, who is forced to come to terms with the fact that there are indeed negative repercussions to selling dearly weapons after he is gravely wounded. And it's got a flying armored war-suit in it.

Iron Man
2008, Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bridges

Anyway, hit the jump for the spoilers, but even if you don't, if you've somehow managed to avoid knowing this: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STAY UNTIL THE END OF THE CREDITS.

Continue reading "I AM IRON MAN" »

If you know me -- and given the size of my audience, you almost certainly do -- you may know that over the years, from time to time, and precipitated by anything in particular, I will suddenly become obsessed with Knight Rider for a while.

In case you somehow don't recall this show, it was about David Hasslehoff and an indestructible Trans Am played by William Daniels, who at the time was famous for having played John Adams in 1776 and for being one of the doctors on Saint Elsewhere, but who, if you're too young to remember Knight Rider, you probably know as the guy who played Mr. Feeny on Boy Meets World. Also, the car could jump. This was incredibly cool, and we totally did not mind that some times when the car jumped into the air it was clearly a toy car being tossed over an H-O scale model, because it was the eighties and you could do that sort of thing.

In case you somehow didn't know this next bit, a couple of weeks ago, NBC, which has recently resurrected the corpses of such popular properties-as-old-as-I-am as Battlestar Galactica and The Bionic Woman aired a backdoor pilot movie for a revival of Knight Rider.

If you know me, or you've been actually reading the article so far, you may be surprised to learn that I somehow managed to delay gratification and have only just watched Knight Rider last night.

Well, see, Leah got aggravated at her landlord, and decided to move. And since she wanted to watch it with me, being a caring and considerate boyfriend, waited until she had at least gotten the TV hooked up in her new place.

So, here we go:

Knight Rider
2008
Justin Bruening
Val Kilmer

Executive Summary: Apparently, there is a company called "Ford" which makes automobiles. These automobiles are available for purchase from many fine retailers, and include both high-performance muscle cars, and sensible and luxurious yet economical models.

Commentary: Knight Rider fans know that after the pilot episode of the original 1982 series, KITT was never referred to as a "Trans Am" again, only as a "Black T-Top" (For those of you who don't know this either, a T-top is a car whose roof is made of two removable panels with a structural beam between them. Not quite as cool as a convertible, but a bit more structurally sound).

According to legend, and as any fan will tell you (One of the major league Knight Rider Geeks even gets to say this as if it's fact on the Knight Rider Season 1 bonus featurette), this is because Pontiac dealers got "annoyed" at people coming in and asking to buy "The Knight Rider Car". Because people coming in and wanting to buy something is such an annoyance. This legend is really a bit of a corruption of the truth of the matter: dealers weren't annoyed: executives were worried. Specifically, they were worried about the liability if someone got themselves killed trying one of the stunts they'd seen in the show. The name shift was mandated by the desire to be able to maintain, if needs be, an official policy of "The car in that show is not a Pontiac: it is an entirely fictional vehicle which, in its fictional world, is completely custom made. It just happens that this fictional vehicle looks like a Pontiac, and also we made the prop, but KITT is no more a Trans Am than Sean Connery is a British secret agent."

Ford, it seems, has no such misgivings. Aside from the advertising blitz (The only way you can tell, on cursory examination, that it's a commercial and not the show is the absence of the channel bug), the Knight Industries Three Thousand bears all its original markings, and every time the scene transitions to KITT, it does so by fading to one of the Mustang Cobra (KITT is not actually a Cobra per se, but I may call him that because Ford used to make a car called the Mustang Cobra which is basically the same sort of car as this is. KITT is a Shelby Mustang GT. "Shelby" here means that Ford went hired Carol Shelby to do his thing to the Mustang. Carol Shelby is a racecar designer who car companies occasionally hire to take their muscle cars and make them even cooler. He takes the car apart and studies every feature and calculates the optimal set of modifications. No one knows why he does this, however, because his next step is invariable "stick in the biggest engine we can find and slap a picture of a snake on it." Carol Shelby's real skill lies, at least in part, in being able to work out how to fit a V-8 into a car that is much too small to hold one. His first such outing was to stick a V-8 in a British AC, producing the "AC Cobra". He went on to design other cars with snake emblems on them, such as the Dodge Viper and a boatload of Mustang-based cars, some of which were called "Mustang Cobras" and some of which were called "Shelby GTs") emblems on the vehicle. And they are not shy about showing these cars do unsafe things (this was one of the major failings of the previous Knight outing).

This is the fourth attempt to revive the Knight Rider franchise. The fact that even if you do remember Knight Rider, odds are you don't remember that this isn't the first revival attempt speaks to the success of these attempts. The first, a straightforward "reunion" movie, Knight Rider 2000 reunited KITT and Michael in the then-still-a-bit-off year 2000, where Dan Quayle is president, guns are illegal, and criminals are frozen using cryogenics. The role of KITT was played by a red custom-made car, which Knight Rider fans will tell you is a Dodge Stealth, but this is about as accurate as saying that a wooden chair is really a tree: the car was an entirely custom body dropped onto the frame and inner workings of a Dodge Stealth. In later years, it was given a police siren and black-and-white paintjob and occasionally turns up as a futuristic police car in cheaper sci-fi, such as Power Rangers Time Force.

Despite having an awesome theme tune by Jan Hammer, and featuring a very funny gag involving James Doohan, the revival went nowhere. Also, the car couldn't jump (It could drive on water, which they thought was nearly as impressive and didn't risk damaging their one-of-a-kind prop car. It probably was more impressive if you didn't remember that the original series had already given KITT a Jesus-mode back in the second season).

So, a few years later, they tried again, as part of a syndication package, either the one that brought us Babylon 5 and no other successful shows, or the one that brought us Hercules The Legendary Journeys and no other successful shows, with a pilot movie called Knight Rider 2010. This time, any connection to the original series was entirely implicit. Rumors have it that they were intending to expand on the connections if they went to series, but they didn't. Set in a Road Warrior post-apocalypse (Thanks to the Mad Max series, everyone who makes movies has an implicit understanding that, for no reason that needs to be explained, no matter how unlikely it may seem, if civilization collapses, the entire world will look like the Australian Outback), some guy who may or may not have turned out to be Michael Knight's son if they'd gone to series armors a classic car and sticks a magic crystal containing the disembodied mind of his dead girlfriend in it, and goes off to fight injustice in the form of a sort of urban assault vehichle made out of a crashed Stealth Fighter. No. Really. I kinda suspect that the original script for this movie has "Mad Max The Series" crossed out and "Knight Rider" penciled in.

The third, and most successful -- but also the one that evoked the most ire -- actually went to series. This was Team Knight Rider, following a sentai-ish team of five drivers driving three Fords and two really ugly custom motorcycles which could merge to form Voltron. This aired in the syndication package that is "the other one" of the two I mentioned above. The cars weren't all that impressive, largely due to the budget. Knight Rider fans are pretty rabid in their love of Pontiacs. Also, the show suffered in spades from trying-hard-to-be-cool. It lasted a whole season, just long enough to show us a stand in playing Michael Knight, David McCallum playing the Evil Overlord, and a metal ball playing KITT. Anyway, a lot of fans actually claimed that the show's producers secretly hated Glen Larson and had intentionally set out to make a bad show in order to tarnish his legacy. I told you Knight Rider fans were a bit nuts.

Anyway, now that you're caught up, I'll head on to the spoilers.

But I find myself wondering: what is it about the Knight Rider franchise that makes people keep wanting to revive it -- and revive it even though there's never been any precedent for a Knight Rider revival succeeding?

Continue reading "One Ford Can Make A Difference" »

1. Having your fingers severed by a chainsaw, though painful, does not require immediate medical attention
2. Everyone over the age of 12 in Bratislava is part of an international serial murdering snuff-ring run by the Russian mob.
3. You can always tell when someone's with the Russian mob by their @gang.rus email address.
4. There is a level of suck a movie can achieve beyond which no amount of Slasher-Film-Nudity can make it watchable.

Now, #2 seems like a pretty bold thing for the makers of this movie to assert. I mean, that's sure to piss off all the people in Bratislava. And I wouldn't want to piss those guys off: I recently learned that they're all part of an international serial-murdering snuff-ring run by the Russian mob.

So, to recap: Bratislava's major exports:

Exceptionally Brief Review of Resident Evil: Extinction

1 part The Road Warrior
1 part Day of the Dead
1 part Waterworld

DO NOT STIR, MIX, OR OTHERWISE ALLOW THESE PLOT ELEMENTS TO HAVE MUCH OF ANYTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER.

Serve warm.

Oh, but when you watch this, consider that if a Zombie Apocalypse story ends with it humanity finally winning and vanquishing the Zombies, the next step is going to be the need to repopulate the human race. Consider what the entire human race consists of at the end of the movie.

Rejoice.

(Spoiler punchline after the jump)

Continue reading "Recipe for a Sequel" »

Transformers
Michael Bay, 2007
Shia LeBeouf, Megan Fox, Jon Voight, Peter Cullen

Brief Summary: Autobots wage their battles to destroy the evil forces of the Decepticons

Less Brief Summary: Transformers is a touching story of a socially awkward boy who manages to snag the girl of his dreams against a backdrop of chaos, and the touching story of a soldier in the middle east struggling to survive overwhelming odds to make it back home to his loving wife and the daughter he hasn't yet met.

Oh, and it's got giant robots in it.

I went to see Transformers last night on the assumption that, this being Michael Bay, it would be a big, beautiful mess: a lot of flashy and exciting and visually impressive action sequences, linked together with a nonsensical and very think spackling of plot.

As it turned out, I had it exactly backwards.

For some reason, the thing that they did, despite it being really obvious, did not occur to me until about the second scene of the film, when we first meet Sam Witwicky (LeBeouf): It is hard to make a successful mainstream movie that is "about" giant CGI robots -- the fans would hate it because of all the things they got "wrong" (Megatron is an alien spaceship, not a Walther P38. Now, Megatron hasn't been a gun since the end of the original series, what with it being a really bad idea to sell a realistic replica of a gun to children to play with. And, I suppose the fact that Megatron no longer violates the law of conservation of matter quite so blatantly soothes my inner geek), and non-fans wouldn't like it because it was, well, about giant CGI robots. So what they did instead was to make this a movie with giant CGI robots, not about giant CGI robots.

Transformers is not a giant fighting robot movie. It's not even quite a monster movie, with the thin veneer of plot encasing a story in which Godzilla really is the star. Transformers is a disaster movie. It's a story about a small band of people struggling to survive under fire from a barely-comprehensible menace from space which spits destruction indescriminantly and against which mankind is essentially powerless.

In point of fact, I was reminded of nothing so much as Deep Impact (Some would say that Armageddon is a closer fit, being another Bay big-flashy-lights-and-splosions feast, but Transformers is much more about the human drama than Armageddon). In fact, we've even got a "meteor" strike as the protoform Autobots crash to Earth.
And since here there be spoilers, you'd better wait until after the jump...

Continue reading "Exactly the same amount as meets the eye" »