Movie Review: The Zookeeper
Maybe there is a reason animals can’t really talk.
Check this out on my YouTube video review.
Before I start ripping into this execrable film, can I state that I for one am sick of Kevin James? I can see him as possibly funny in stand up, but his film presence has just gotten overused and unpleasant. He seems to always play the same role he pioneered in King of Queens: fat loser who through the machinations of fate has somehow managed to land one or more stunningly hot women. I am not sure what dimension this is a viable possibility in, but for those of us who remain firmly ensconced in this reality it is actually a really annoying insult. I don’t consider myself fat or a loser and I can’t pull that kind of action on my best day. I’m stuck in the Bizarro world version where I get rejected constantly by the hot girls and seem to end up with the female Kevin James’s of the world. Unfortunately, he seems patently unqualified for any other type of role (could you really see him as a villain of in a serious role?) so it looks like we will be inundated in future moronic rom-coms like this (mor-rom-coms?)
Which brings us to the Zookeeper. Kevin James stars as a fat loser who works as a zookeeper and, for some ungodly reason, dates the stunning Leslie Bibb. Her character, Stephanie, is in all regards a one dimensional, self centered, shallow bitch who rejects the most awkward marriage proposal of all time simply because he works as a zookeeper. Apparently his lack of fitness or financial status are not really a concern. Anyway, she crushes him in a manner so cruel that it is likely banned by Geneva convention. Fast forward five years and he is now the lead zookeeper who works with the even more stunning Rosario Dawson, who is an “eagle enclosure expert” (does that seem a little specific to you? How many jobs are there for such a person) with a heart of gold. SPOILER ALERT: in a plot “twist” so cookie cutter I could smell ginger she turns out to be the girl he should have been into the whole time and ends the movie with. I normally would hesitate to give away something that crucial to the story, but within the first 30 seconds of her being on the screen I said” Yep, she’s the one he’ll end up with.”
By the way, I would like to point out that I am totally into Rosario Dawson. She is super hot and can actually act. What she can’t do is find a movie script that doesn’t suck. Before doing the Zookeeper, she has starred in any amount of crud. Her best movie to date (IMO) would have to be Unstoppable. She was in Death Proof, but as much as a fan of grind house theater as I am I can’t really see it as a vehicle (haw) for advancing your acting career. Percy Jackson sucked, as did Sin City, Clerks II, the Adventures of Pluto Nash, Josie and the Pussycats, Kill Shot, Eagle Eye, and Seven Pounds. When she was younger she did Kids, which is a good movie in the “looking for something to watch while killing yourself” category, but other than that she needs to find a new agent. (Josie and the Pussycats image courtesy of the comic book t shirt category)
Anyway, the guy states that he should leave working for the zoo in order to get a job that better appeals to the most shallow woman on the planet. We also start getting subjected to some truly painful and hard to watch physical comedy. At that point we find out that the animals can not only understand everything the humans are saying, but can speak perfect English too when they want to. They decide they need to help Kevin ‘mate” with Stephanie and end up giving him dopey advice with dialog so cliche and hackneyed that it made me wish that the animals only speak in barks and roars, as well as the humans in this flick.
So, romantic animal hijinks ensues. Kevin James urinates into a potted plant at a fancy restaurant to “mark his territory” and doesn’t get arrested. He more or less ruins his brother’s wedding and physically assaults the bride. He ends up toe to toe with another ex boyfriend of Stephanie, played horribly by Joe Rogan. I’ve seen Joe do some funny stuff, but the combination of his stiff delivery and the flaccid, depthless character he was handed made every scene with him in it feel like waiting on line at the DMV. Kevin’s character does a Peter-Parker-in-Spiderman-3 transformation into a suave, sophisticated urbanite who sells exotic cars to the thousands of millionaire who reside in his city. Stephanie plays the shallow, cultureless girlfriend to the hilt. Somehow Ken Jeong managed to land a roll as the creepy reptile guy. Is he going to have a bit part in every movie? Eventually Kevin discovers he really loves Rosario Dawson but apparently forgets how to use a cell phone as the only way to intercept her on the way to her new job in Nairobi (no joke. I guess they need an eagle cage there too) is a “hilarious” chase sequence in a stolen van.
Ok, the stars. The animation for the animals was as good as you are likely to see. One star. There were a few funny moments. One star. Rosario Dawson was looking hot throughout the movie, and when she dressed up super hot. One star. While the animal dialog sucked, there were a couple voices that made me laugh (Adam Sandler and Sylvester Stallone, for the most part). One star. For the extremely brief amount of time he was on screen, Ken Jeong managed to amuse me and more or less stole every scene he was in. Also he had a really cool car. One star. There was one scene where Kevin takes a gorilla out to TGI Fridays that was actually fun to watch, mainly because it was Kevin James cutting loose with a guy in a gorilla suit. One star. Total: six stars.
Now, like a tiger who has taken down an antelope and is ready to dig into the succulent entrails, I move to the black holes. The animal dialog was as bad as human language can get. Two black holes. Painful to watch physical humor. One black hole. For some reason, the director of photography seemed to feel that Kevin James’s moon face was the most appealing thing in the movie and thus we are subjected to a lot of it. Also, at one point we see him naked in a bathtub. One black hole. I’d like to give a black hole for every awkward moment that seemed to drag on forever (starting with the opening one), but will hold myself back. Two black holes. There was a completely irrelevant tangent that added nothing to the movie about Kevin’s character interacting with the high fashion world. One black hole. What extremely little character development the film had was extremely predictable. One black hole. In fact, the whole movie was excruciatingly predictable. One black hole. While pretty much all the animals except the gorilla annoyed me (there’s something you don’t say every day), the interaction between the two bears seemed to actually cause me physical pain. One black hole. Implied and described animal cruelty. One black hole. Joe Rogan bringing whatever momentum the film had to a screeching halt. One black hole. And two more black holes for just not being as much fun as it should have been. Total: fourteen black holes.
So a total of eight black holes, a fairly miserable score but not as bad as the score I gave Green Lantern. I can hear some of you asking if I might be being a little unfair to this film, critiquing it as an adult when it could possible just be a kids film. Well, honestly that is one of the issues here. This movie is a romantic comedy with talking animals. It can’t really decide if it is going to be a kids film or an adult film. Some of the dialog is too sophisticated and adult themed for kids, but some of it is just too dumb for grown ups. It sits right in the middle, which means it will inevitably be relegated to the mediocrity archive of all time. I’m actually curious as to where video shops (assuming any still exist) end up placing it. Honestly, don’t waste your time with this dog, unless you are one of those rare individuals who are enraptured by a Geico commercial.
I did experience something weird while watching this. For the first time since I started these reviews I found myself wondering if I am really qualified to do them. I am very rarely plagued by self doubt, but while I was praying for a film break or merciful death most of the audience was laughing their asses off. I worried that maybe I am too out of touch with the general movie going audience, but I thought about it a lot on the way home and came to the conclusion that this is an example of cultural Darwinism. If, for example, I were to open a retail shop that specialized in left handed scissors and the like, than I would not be surprised to find that most of my customers were left handed. Likewise, if Hollywood sets out to create a film designed to appeal to the true idiots of our society, than I should not be surprised if I sit in a theater full of idiots. I have found that when I go to the movies on $5 night the bar seems to be lowered considerably. Odds are this movie will make a disappointingly large amount of money, leading us inevitably to the next bad rom-com staring Kevin James with yet another super hot girl.
The Science and Stupidity of Kryptonite
So a few weeks ago I saw the most recent Superman movie again. Something has been always bothering me about Superman and Kryptonite, and earlier today while sitting in traffic on the Bay Bridge it suddenly occurred to me what it was. For this explanation we will have to turn to true friend of all nerds, science.
(Superman image courtesy of the Superman t shirt category)
Here’s the deal. I will buy that Jor-el was a super scientist who could make a space ship capable to traveling to earth in a matter of a few hours (any more than that might have resulted in a bad case of SIDS). However, if the planet Krypton blew itself up, how long would it really have taken for chunks of the planet to arrive on Earth? If we assume Krypton was close to us (and not on the other side of the galaxy) then at best it’s 4.5 light years minimum distance. Now, an explosion that propels an object is essentially a bullet. The fastest rifle bullets travel at about 4,000 feet per second. If we boost that up (assuming Krypton REALLY blew up) to about 5,280 feet per second, that’s about a mile a second (I never said I was going to make this science part hard on me).
So a mile a second (which is extremely generous) will essentially mean that it would take a chunk of Krypton 5,865,696,000,000 seconds to cover one light year. A little basic arithmetic tells me that it would take a meteorite of Kryptonite 837,000 years to reach Earth. Why, then, does the local museum have a chunk of it lying around for Lex Luthor to steal? For that matter pieces of it are falling out of the sky all the time in the comics. I’m sure some kind of argument could be made for a relativistic shift in time for Superman’s ship, but that would just make things worse. If his ship were slowing down it time it could only be because he were traveling at close to the speed of light, which would still have had him arriving here in a few short years.
Now let’s consider the geometry. I did some research and discovered that in order for a sizable meteor to arrive on the planet earth it has start out about basketball sized. In order to make things easier for me, I am going to assume a 1 foot ball. Now, assume Krypton were broken up into nothing but 1 foot squares (and none of it were broken up into marble sized of just vaporised outright). If Krypton were about earth sized it would have a radius of 3,963 miles, or 209,246,440 feet. Using the volume of a sphere equation, V=4/3(pi)(r)cubed, we get 3.86762×10(25)th power. That’s a lot of basketballs. However, if we take a volume of space with a radius of 4.5 light years, we get an area of space encompasing 8.4537×10(38)th power. That’s one basketball of Kryptonite per 2.18578×10(13)th power. At our largest point we are 94.5 million miles from the sun. That means we occupy a disk of space that is 4.70614×10(12)th power. In other words, in our little volume or space there should be exactly on chunk of Krypton big enough to land on Earth and, assuming it doesn’t get caught by Saturn or any of the other outer planets, there is only about a 1/10 chance of it landing on us.
Now that’s not entirely fair, as everyone knows that the basketballs would not be distributed evenly throughout the universe. They would keep traveling. So instead of volume, lets consider the explosion of Krypton the instigator of an expanding sphere of planetary debris. I think the best way to think of this would be as 1 foot chunks of Kryptons surface expanding outwards. Now the area of a sphere is determined by A-4(pi)r(squared). Again assuming Krypton about the same as planet Earth means the surface is comprised of at most 5.50206×10(15)th power basketballs. If they all blew up strait ahead (and assuming the debris underneath it more or less followed in a strait line from the center of the explosion) by the time the debris reach earth the area of the sphere would be 4.32363×10(26)th power square miles. That’s one basketball per 7.8219×10(10)th power. Assuming the eliptical plane of the planet rotation is exactly perpendicular to the expanding debris, our planet occupies a ring of about 5.9565×10(8)th power. That’s even worse than going by volume. And again, this is all based just on the area of space we are likely to occupy, not the fact that our planet is actually pretty tiny on an astronomical scale.
So you can see how dumb it is that Kryptonite be just lying around for any petty criminal or evil scientific super genius to find and fashion into a weapon. Sorry if I spoiled the magic for you, but I have always been more of a Batman guy myself.
Movie review: Horrible Bosses
Horribly mediocre.
Yet another raunchy rated R comedy hoping to score a seat on the success train that the Hangover powered and then later derailed, I guess. Funny in parts, long and boring in others. I guess I am tired of Hollywood not doing a lot of either really good or really bad films. Best film I have seen in months was the Trollhunter, an independant.
Anyway, Horrible Bosses. It tells the story of three employees who have good jobs ruined by bad bosses. They are Dale, Nick, and Kurt, played by Kenny Sommerfield, Nick Hendricks, and Jason Sudeikis respectively but for the duration of this review I am going to call them Larry, Moe, and Curly for reasons that will be painfully obvious to anyone who watches this flick (Three Stooges image courtesy of the movie t shirt category). Larry works as a dental hygienist who’s boss is a dentist so painfully hot she made my eyes water and is consistently sexually abusing him (which of us hasn’t had to deal with that, right guys?). Moe is a white collar drone who is abused by his boss (played very well by Kevin Spacey). Curly is an accountant at a chemical firm who’s boss dies and leaves the company to his drug addicted son.
Anyway, all three of them are terribly abused by their bosses and decide they need to kill them. The go looking for a hit man at a bar they should have all been killed in and find “M-F-Er” Jones (Jamie Foxx). He tells them they should each kill the others bosses to allay suspicion. So, having decided that first degree murder is a reasonable solution for someone inconveniencing their lives, they start to plan it out.
At this point the movie, which had been kind of entertaining and had the potential to be decent, took a wrong turn and ended up in Stupidville, USA. Ever see that episode of the Three Stooges where they break into someones house who turns out to be a Nazi spy? Imagine that, but less funny. Larry, Moe, and Curly start doing everything possible to avoid making an intelligent or well thought out move. They run around the bosses houses, breaking stuff and leaving a laundry list of forensic evidence. Other stooges-like hijinks ensue. Unfunny recurring jokes are drummed on and on. Kevin Spacey turns out to be even more evil than first portrayed. The realities of living in the world and dealing with police (remember that cops can hold you for 48 hours without charging you for questioning?) or more or less ignored. At one point Kevin Spacey rams his SUV into Moe’s Prius and then tells them he is going to frame them for something and claim they tried to kill him. Really? When any idiot could look at the two cars and figure out that you just tried to flatten them? No chance of that plan backfiring on you.
Anyway, the stars. The three main characters are reasonably funny. One star. Kevin Spacey. One star. Some funny lines and decent dialog. One star. The dentist (played by my dream woman Jeniffer Aniston, who decided to drive me even more crazy by going brunette) is super hot and doesn’t mind dressing skimpy. In fact most of the women were very easy on the eyes. Two stars. Jaime Foxx was pretty damned good and dominated every scene he was in in a good way. One star. Donald Sutherland. One star. Total: six stars.
Now the black holes. The movie and plot devices got really dumb after a while. Two black holes. All the boss characters were horribly (haw!) one dimensional, especially Kevin Spacey. One black hole. In spite of the fact that the bosses were one dimensionally evil, the fact that the protagonists were planning a capital crime to make their lives easier did nothing to make me sympathetic to them, nor did they do anything during the movie to change that. I don’t really feel sympathy towards idiots. One black hole. The whole “super-hot-and-successful-chick-is-a-freak-and-feels-the-need-to-molest-a-wimpy-innocent-guy plot device is so asinine and infuriating that I wanted to punch out the theater manager on the way to my car. It would have actually made the movie so much more tolerable and believable (as well as made me more sympathetic to their cause) if the person being sexually harassed were a woman by a male boss, not to mention add a nice diversity to the main cast (I guess they wanted to keep that Stooges dynamic rolling). One black hole. All the supporting characters except M-F-er Jones were moronic and annoying. One black hole. I can’t put my finger on what the problem was, but the pacing seemed really off. It was like the movie had a 85 minute Act 1 setup, 13 minute Act 2 confrontation, and a 2 minute Act 3 resolution (thank you world wide web). One black hole. The resolution so reeked of deus ex machina that the main characters might as well have been trapped inside stasis pods. One black hole. And finally, if you are going to create a rated R comedy anyway for gods sake put some nudity in there somewhere. Rated R for language is like going to prison for stealing socks. If you are going to do the time, you might as well enjoy the crime. One black hole. Total: nine black holes.
In the irksome category, I have a couple. I don’t know what planet the script writers live on, but if on their alien world all it takes is five minutes to meet a married super hot model and convince her to have sex with you in a restroom I want to move there. Same with super hot dentists willing to have sex with any stalker parked across their street. Also, during the course of the film I thought of about 10 different ways the protagonists could have resolved their issues without resorting to murder. I have to imagine at some point someone read the script before or during the production.
So a less than grand total of four black holes. Entertaining enough, I suppose. I had a free ticket so it didn’t cost me anything. I don’t think I would have been happy spending money on it. Wait for NetFlix, I guess.
By the way, I have fixed the issue with leaving comments but getting rid of that stupid capcha thing. Just try to be human when you post something. Thanks Cassady for pointing that out.
Movie review: Midnight in Paris
Just a little past my bedtime.
Life is so unfair. The fact is I think Woody Allen is a degenerate creep (and coming from me, that’s saying a lot) and would love nothing more than to trash his latest picture. However, even going into this flick with my hackles pre-raised, it was a funny and charming experience. Woody managed to not insert himself into the film in any way, which I think helped me forget what a perv he is.
I’m not saying the film is a cinema masterpiece. I’m also not a fan of French culture, so the whole “Paris is the most romantic city on the planet” thing is lost on me (if you really want romance check out Bakersfield, California). As far as I can see, the entire city is comprised of cobblestones and murky fountains. However, the film is entertaining and fun, if a little slow at times.
The story is of Gil (Owen Wilson), a Hollywood script writer who dreams of writing a novel and of living in Paris in the 1920’s. He is in Paris with his bitchy fiance Inez (the pretty damned hot Rachel McAddams) and her parents on some kind of ill defined business trip. He feels his contribution to the literary world is less than impressive (and as a movie reviewer who sees a lot of the crappy scripts being churned out of Hellywood I can’t disagree with him) and wants to do more than just be fabulously wealthy. Inez is the 100% stereotypical So Cal materialistic bitch who only wants to spent a ton of money on French stuff (18,000 Euros for a chair? Give me a break) in a desperate attempt to add culture to her bland, pathetic life. At night Gil wanders around the city and, at exactly midnight, is somehow transported to the 1920s.
There he parties with some of the greatest artist and writers of the age, most notably Ernest Hemmingway. Somehow they all speak English, which is convenient as for a guy who has dreamed of living in Paris for years he has done very little to learn French (ever heard of Rosetta Stone?). Some of them are expatriates, but a lot just seem to know enough English to get by. They all seem to spend every night drinking, driving, and smoking. He meets his dream woman (Marion Cotillard, the wife from Inception) and has a sort of romance with her. He also gets Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) to read and critique his manuscript. Meanwhile his fiance is partying with a really annoying know-it-all (doesn’t he realize that I am the final authority on all things cultural?) and his future father-in-law hires a PI to find out where he goes every night in a relatively innocuous sub plot. Paris hijinks ensues, both in the 1920s and present. Gil evolves as a human being. A lot of alcohol gets drunk. A lot of literary references, some subtle, some not so much, get dropped.
The stars. The movie was entertaining and intelligently written. One star. Woody Allen resisted the urge to insert himself into the movie (how many bumbling old timid stereotypical Jewish men can we watch in a lifetime?). One star. Most of the supporting characters were extremely entertaining, particularly Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. One star. The film work was excellent. Paris was shot brilliantly and the lighting really added to the contrast between 1920s Paris and modern Paris. One star. All of the women (except Kathy Bates, I guess) were pretty damned hot. Even the tour guide. One star. Woody never attempted to explain the time travel mechanic, which in another film would probably infuriate me but in this one was pretty much required. One star. Charming. One star. No forced attempt to add entirely unnecessary action or chase scenes to make it more appealing to the morons out there. One star. Overall a good experience. One star. Total: nine stars.
Now the black holes. While I appreciate having a specific style, if you had not told me this was a Woody Allen film at the beginning I would have known it within the first ten minutes. You can almost hear Woody reading out some of the dialog. One black hole. Of all the characters, Owen Wilson as the protagonist was the most annoying and worst performance. His laid back California dude-bro attitude did not really enhance the character, and in scenes where he was supposed to show some kind of excitement (obviously his most difficult performances) you could almost see him flick the activation switch to go from deadpan to excited deadpan. I find him to be the Ambien of actors. One black hole. The pacing needed work. There were scenes that seemed to drag on at times, and other scenes that ended abruptly just as I was getting into them. Also, the repetitive nature of the night after night party took on a Groundhog Day effect that slowed the film down. One black hole. With the exception of Gil, we never got to spend enough time with any of the characters to really appreciate them, even when it was painfully obvious that the character was really interesting and I for one wanted to learn more. One black hole. Total: four black holes.
Nothing else really hit the irksome category, although I did find the final romance came out of pretty much nowhere.
So a grand total of five stars. Is it fun and worth watching? Yes. Should you see it in the theater? No, unless you really love Paris and want to see it on a bigger screen. Good date movie? Absolutely, as long as your date doesn’t hate Woody Allen for marrying his adopted daughter. If she is cool with him then you could score some points for being sensitive and intellectual. The real question is how will it stand when compared to his other 200 films. Honestly, not particularly well. It’s no Bullets over Broadway or Match Point. I would rather see Sleeper to be honest. In a couple years it will be just another film he did; worth your time, but not worth gushing about.
By the way, I am still trying to get the whole video review thing going, but as usual have run into some technical issues. I think I am going to have to start over. Also I have a huge trip coming up Thursday and won’t have my iMac with me, so it might be a while. Meanwhile I am scrambling to get all the new Star Trek t shirts uploaded, and have gotten into the minor shows like DS9 and Voyager. I might see another film tomorrow and write something, but who knows? I still need to finish all those Star Trek movies.
Movie Review: Bad Teacher
Bad Teacher was not a bad movie. Not brilliant, or even consistently funny, but it had it’s moments and was at the least entertaining.
Before I get into this I should mention that, due to some seriously crossed wires in my head, nothing fills my mind with senseless violence like dance clubs. If you see me hanging out while other people are dancing to beat heavy bass music you can rest assured that my mind is playing a medley of violence and mayhem that would make John Woo turn pale. I have never acted on this sort of thing, and the last fight I was in was back in 7th grade (ironically, the same grade that this movie was about.
Why am I mentioning this? Because the second thing that fills my mind with repressed childhood violence is anything involving school. I just keep flashing back to all the abuse I suffered as a kid and teenager and start to see blood. So you can image what happens when I see a movie that involves some kind of school dance, as this one does. In high school I went to exactly two dances and regretted both of them.
The funny thing is, if I go to a dance club and actually start dancing I have a great time and forget about all that stuff. But if I am doing my usual wallflower routine, in my head is total chaos.
The movie. Cameron Diaz plays Elizabeth Halsey, a vain, shallow, self centered, foul mouthed middle school teacher who is also an alcoholic and pot user. There is no attempt to explain how she became a teacher or even graduated college, but there it is. She start off engaged to a rich guy who dumps her for determining (correctly) that she is a gold digger. In a move guaranteed to advance women’s advocacy and liberation, she decides she needs to find another rich guy and the way to do that is to get a boob job (did I say advance? I meant to say retard). Fortunately she works at a school that doesn’t seem to have any kind of teaching standards or ability to perceive a bad apple. She gets hit on by the gym teacher (Jason Segel, from How I Met Your Mother) and dumps him flat out in a scene that could only be crueler if she actually castrated him while doing it. Cruel and selfish are the watchwords for her, and while it occasionally generates some funny moments or lines, after about an hour it starts to wear thin. I mean, at some point you have to give us SOME reason to like her besides the fact that she is hot and witty. During the course of the movie she smokes pot on school property, steals test answers, blackmails a guy, ruins the career of the only truly dedicated and giving teacher in the film (Lucy Punch, who is actually super hot if you like red heads), purposely destroys a relationship, denigrates and humiliates her students, steals, lies, manipulates, and drinks. If she were a male you would assume she were the antagonist, not the protagonist. She has a couple moments towards the end where she turns it around, and sort of follows an arc, but the arc actually feels like a straight line that suddenly makes an illegal u-turn in front of four lanes of oncoming traffic.
Anyway, she is added by straight woman Phyllis Smith (from the Office, one of my favorite shows. Dunder Miflin shirt courtesy of the TV show t shirts) in her quest to score the hot (if you like weedy) new sub Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake), who in spite of being a low paid teacher comes from some kind of super rich family, a fact that Halsey spots like a vulture spotting a dying rabbit from 1,000 feet up. He starts out like a cool and sincere guy, but as the movie progresses turns out to be weirder and weirder. Middle school teaching hijinks ensues. Kids get hit in the face with balls. Some Guy Ritchie-esque plot twists occur. Horrible people fail to get their comeuppance, while (relatively) innocent people suffer bad consequences.
The stars. One star for the adult acting, although really I think it is just good casting. Is it really that much of a stretch for Cameron Diaz to play a vapid, shallow, gold digging bitch (not that I know anything about her personally. It just seems like a movie role she is really comfortable with)? Or for Jason Segel a sarcastic gym teacher and Phyllis Smith a timid nobody? Honestly, the best actor in this was Justin Timberlake, as much as it galls me to say it. One star. I am going to give a separate star for the kid actors. What has been happening lately where kids all learned how to act? It started with Super 8 and seems to be continuing. One star. The movie did make me laugh multiple times. On star. Pacing was really good, given that the movie stretched over the course of an entire school year. One star. All of the supporting characters were good and added something to the movie. None of them felt like wasted film. One star. Cameron Diaz and Lucy Punch were both pretty hot, although Diaz got the better outfits. One star. There was possibly the most gratuitous nude scene of all time that bordered into implied lesbianism. One star. Dialog was witty and very funny. One star. In spite of the horrible nature of Diaz’s character I did find myself identifying with her and ultimately rooting for her. One star. Total: nine stars.
Now the black holes. The horrific nature of Diaz’s character really ground on me after a while, and kind of made me afraid to ever date a woman again. One black hole. No attempt to even give a reason why she became a teacher or why any school with any kind of standards would hire her. One black hole. The plot is predictable with a capital P. One black hole. Some moments you were laughing, other moments you were cringing into your seat hoping the last joke or scene would be washed from your memory. One black hole. The ‘change of heart’ Halsey goes through in the last ten minutes felt less like a story arc and more like her body snatchers pod finally ripened and her replacement clone had arrived. One black hole. Some minor plot issues on the order of “Why would they put up with that crap?”. One black hole. Total: six black holes.
That whole “School dances make me go berserk” thing I could have given a black hole to, but I think that is my own personal issue, not shared by a lot of you. I also found irksome the fact that a super rich, super hot (apparently) guy would even want to be a teacher.
Anyway, three stars total. Worth seeing on NetFlix, I guess. Not a good date movie, in spite of it being more or less a chick flick, as your date will assume (probably correctly) that you have a thing for Cameron Diaz and that is the only reason you are going. Of course, you could retort with the idea that she is only there for Justin Timberlake, but trust me when I say there is no winning that argument.
What’s going on lately?
I know. I haven’t been blogging as much as I was even two weeks ago. 
The fact is I am super busy with a bunch of work projects (cough cough adding more nerd t shirts cough cough) and a good blog for me can take over two hours to write. I don’t just crank them out (like I am for this one). That’s how much I love you, my beloved reader.
I have been sidetracked by another project that I think will turn into a lot of fun for you and me. As you might know, I recently went through the extremely painful transformation from PC to Mac and am still going through some pains. However, I have been playing around with iMovie and think I should try to do some of my movie reviews as videos. I tried the camera on the new comp but forgot how hideously non-photogenic (that’s my way of denying that I have looks issues) I am, and so have decided not to use my face. Instead I will flash back to 1994 and dust off my drawing pens in order to give you a quality animated experience. Yes, I have been inspired by other popular blog reviewers and am going to more or less rip them off, except for the fact that I will be generating my own content.
Anyway, I am going to work on my first one this weekend, and I think it will be the review I did from the most recent Transformers. It’s funny and I bitch about it a lot. Meanwhile, tonight I think I will finally get around to seeing Bad Teacher and let you know what my thoughts on that are.
By the way, I will be looking for some theme music that won’t get me sued, so if you have a band and want to get your music out there with a plug to your site on each one send me an email at [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Star Trek movie retrospective Part 5: the Final Frontier
Ah, the faint rotten egg smell of suck finally grows and permeates every pore of the hallowed Star Trek franchise. The movies prior to this one had their issues, but the faint whiffs of lame that wafted off them was nothing compared to the overpowering odor emanating from The Final Frontier. This thing reeked like a giant blender full of dead skunks (movie poster image courtesy, as always, of the Star Trek T shirts category).
To be honest, I couldn’t for the life of me remember anything from this dog. I had to Google Star Trek 5 to even figure out which title this was, and then watch the extended trailer to be reminded of what the damn thing was about. However, that two minutes was enough to unlock the repressed memories and like a recovered experience of childhood sexual molestation the horribleness flooded back into the crappy theater of my mind.
The biggest problem with this film was they let Shatner direct it, as well as having a hand in the so called writing. Honestly, would you take even the greatest NASCAR driver in the world and let him design a car from scratch? Sure, he might have some great ideas as to features you could use, but he just wouldn’t have the engineering skills to build a great car. Shatner’s influence is felt in every vomit inducing scene, with an attempt being made to make him look like he wasn’t a out of shape 58 year old.
Anyway, what was happening in 1989? I was personally in a weird place. You see, in 1987 I dropped out of UC Irvine to pursue a career as a lifetime ditchdigger. I got a job working graveyard shift in a medical lab that could be accurately described as hell. In 1989 I realized this sucked and reapplied to UCI. In June when this movie came out I was still working graveyard and looking for anything to help me escape the horrible life experience. This movie looked like a life preserver being tossed to a drowning man, but when it landed it turned out to me made of lead. That was also the year when I most completely misinterpreted a super hot girl’s interest in me, my family left the house I grew up in to live in a crappy mobile home in Fullerton, CA., and my sister went to live with her super hot friend (who had no interest in me, surprise surprise) in order to graduate high school.
In the world gas was $.97 a gallon, the USSR admitted defeat and left Afghanistan (good thing we were never in there. Oh, wait), apartheid starts to be dismantled in South Africa, free elections are happening in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the Berlin Wall falls, the Chinese government runs over students in Tiananmen Square with tanks, the Exxon Valdez dumps 11 million barrels of oil into Prince William Sound, Bush Sr. is elected president, flag burning is legalized by the Supreme Court, Leona Helmsley goes to jail, Toyota launches Lexus, Ted Bundy was executed, Salman Rushdie is sentenced to death for writing a really boring book (some kind of religious thing too, but book critics were harsh in those days), the very first GPS satellites are put in orbit, Game Boy comes out in Japan, the Intel 486 chip comes out, Microsoft releases it’s first version of Office (which I just spent $120 on. Bastards), and the US Goverenment gives $150 billion to failing banks and savings and loans (ha ha ha. $150 billion. Amateurs).
In entertainment, it was mixed. The Simpsons aired for the first time with some episode that at the time ruled but in retrospect are literally painful to watch. Movies were Batman, When Harry Met Sally, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, My Left Foot, Dead Poets Society, Ghostbusters II, Twins (oh, Arnold), Honey I Shrunk the Kids (was this movie not kind of a death toll for children’s movies to come?), License to Kill, and the Little Mermaid. New Kids on the Block were killing American culture. Other popular music included Duran Duran, Erasure, Prince, Depeche Mode, and Paula Abdul.
Anyway, kind of an up year, in my opinion, if only because I got back into college. I don’t think this film contributed or denigrated the current cultural clime.
The story. Shatner starts off by trying to convince the audience that Kirk can free climb El Capitan in Yosemite, a cliff that is considered extremely challenging even for expert rock climbers. The scene is easily the worst rock climbing scene in cinema history (and yes, I have seen Cliffhanger), and Spocks “rescue” of Kirk when the inevitable happens and Kirk falls Wile E Coyote style suspended my disbelief so high that it if it had fallen it also would have needed a rocket boot powered Spock to save it.
By the way, I’m not kidding about this. I studied physics in college and rate of decent is a pretty simple equation. d=1/2gT(squared). d=distance, g=gravity (in this case, on earth, 32 feet per second, squared), T=Time. El Capitan is 3,000 feet tall. Assuming Kirk was near the top (he wasn’t, but we’ll let that slide). If we plug that in to the equation you end up with a T of 13.69 seconds. It took Spock at least 4 seconds to completely invert himself, and, theoretically, the same at the bottom, leaving 5.69 seconds of time to accelerate and decelerate. The g force for the 2.345 seconds he had to catch Kirk should have bent his spine in half.
Anyway, Spock saves Kirk, leading to a campfire scene so awkward I wanted to stick my head in the flames in order to have the sound of my flesh frying drown it out. Kirk does a bromance monolog about how he can never fail as long as Spock and Bones were around (I guess Scotty was off polishing his widgets or something). They get called to rescue some hostages on the planet Nimbus III (the Nimbus was Zap Brannigan’s ship on Futurama, by the way. Subtle). On Nimbus III they run into Spocks half brother (small universe) who is some kind of full blooded yet super emotional Vulcan (what the hell?) who is on some kind of religious quest to find God (no joke) on a planet at the exact center of the universe. The center of the universe is behind some kind of barrier (no danger there) and he needs a ship to make it happen.
Meanwhile they are being pursued by some Klingons for no apparent reason. I guess they are still pissed about Kirk stealing a ship in the Search for Spock? I really can’t remember. They land on the planet and meet a creature who is supposed to be God, but who needs a ship to escape. Not exactly Omnipotent. The creature goes nuts and Spocks brother has to combat him while the others escape. It’s all kind of a blur at that point. Enterprise shoots the creature, the Klingon ship attacks the Enterprise, Kirk beams to the Klingon ship, some kind of hostage thing happens, and somehow peace reigns once more, with Kirk, Spock, McCoy collecting ticks and chiggers in Yosemite once again.
What it had:
The stupidest looking guns in sci fi history (I’m not kidding on this either. Star Trek has always had guns that look like TV remote controls (or dumber. This is one of my few issues with Star Trek) but these guns look like you made them out of supplies from a plumbing store and based the design on a Super Soaker). Rocket boots. Slapstick (Scotty knocks himself out by walking into a beam. No danger of brain damage there). A really stupid prison break (Scotty “blows a hole in the wall” of the brig, which looks like it was made out of drywall and somehow doesn’t kill or injure the guys inside the very small room. Do the terms “compression” or “spalling” mean nothing?). An emotional Vulcan. A religious Vulcan. A stupid Vulcan. A Vulcan with a forehead big enough to land a shuttle craft on. (these are all the same Vulcan, by the way). The first signs of senility from DeForrest Kelley (watch him at the campfire). A couple of good lines (“Excuse me? What does God need with a space ship?”). In spite of the ego trip, Kirk acting more like Kirk from the series.
What it didn’t have:
A reason to keep me from killing myself. A coherent plot. A clear villain. A prop maker who didn’t ride to work in the short bus. Hot chicks of any kind. An executive producer, apparently.
So, with a couple of decent moments, overall a bust. We will see a ray of hope in the next film but at this point in my opinion the franchise is circling the drain. I need to run but that’s it for now.
Movie Review: Larry Crowne
I don’t want to claim I have psychic powers of any kind. I’m not even sure if I believe in that sort of thing, and if I did I am sure I would enjoy spending time in Vegas a lot more than I do. The fact is, however, I sometimes get premonitions, which I actually like to attribute to my subconscious mind having a better understanding of my mental processes, schedule, and world circumstances than I could ever hope to. The fact is, when I saw the trailer for Larry Crowne, deep inside of me I something said “Yep, you are going to see that movie” in spite of the fact that I have no interest in this type pf sappy feel good dross.
Now, I don’t know if it is fair to say I had no interest in anything associated with this film. The fact is I think Tom Hanks is one of the most powerful actors around today. His performances in movies like Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump, Philadelphia, and Castaway are some of the most amazing movie experiences you could hope to see. Furthermore, Julia Roberts, in addition to being an amazing actress in her own right, is someone who turns me on like a massive Viagra overdose. Her face, her hair, and my perception of her personality based on seeing her in many films really lights my fuse (happy 4th of July, by the way). However, I just don’t normally go for films that don’t involve action, explosions, or 
human struggle against true adversity (I’d like to say struggle against adversity, but except for The Dark Crystal I can’t think of a good film that doesn’t actually involve humans in some way. I guess we are somewhat specist. Dark Crystal image courtesy of the movie t shirt category).
However, yesterday was my mothers birthday, and like the dutiful son I occasionally claim to be I drove down to LA and took her out for dinner and a movie. This was the only movie I thought remotely acceptable to her that wouldn’t make me vomit or doze off. Like I said, I enjoy Tom Hanks and can watch Julia Roberts on screen all day. I think the best way to describe this movie is with the word “satisfying”. It is not a great movie. It is not ground breaking. It doesn’t have amazing performances (that’s not to imply it has any bad performances, either). There are no amazing story revelations, and you will not really feel you have learned anything or that your life has in any ways improved for having seen it. You will, however, walk away feeling satisfied that there is some justice, poetry, and beauty in the world.
So, Larry Crowne, or, as I keep wanting to say it, The Thomas Crowne Affair, the movie that introduced me to the concept of hot MILF nudity. Tom Hanks more or less blends every character he has ever done in every movie into Larry Crowne, an ex navy cook who works at a retail store that is most definitely not Walmart in spite of being similar in almost every way. The only two exceptions are that it is called UMart and Larry and the rest of his fellow employees seem happy to be working there, unlike every Walmart employee in the history of the world. Larry gets laid off for the unlikely reason of not having any college education and, after a series of long dealing-with-unemployment-and-looking-for-a-job scenes decides what he needs is to gain some education and heads to the nearest community college. There he meets a crazy seeming man who turns out to be the dean of students who recommend he takes some kind of speech class, taught by super hot TILF Julia Roberts. He also takes an economics class taught by the most pleasant surprise of the movie for me, the great George Takai. George more or less steals the show in every scene he is in, and I loved him as the stuffy professor. Larry also bought a scooter from his neighbor, who runs a 24/7 garage sale of some kind. Thanks to the scooter he meets super duper cute scooter girl Talia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, a girl with a weird name I have never seen before but hope to see again), who takes an unnatural interest in Larry that would be creepy and stalker-ish if it were a guy working on a girl. She and her (kind of annoying) West Side Story scooter gang take him riding, cut his hair, make him change his clothes, and completely rearrange his house until he is as cool as a 55 year old guy hanging out with college kids can be. His character does a full arc, learning in his econ class the value of defaulting on his home, changing his entire life, and eventually getting a job as a cook at his buddies diner. Meanwhile, Julia Roberts is going through her own arc as she kicks out her husband (played by Bryan Cranston, the dad from Malcolm in the Middle) for spending all day claiming to be a blogger but instead looking at online porn (wait a minute…). She kind of self destructs for a while. Anyway, community college hijinks ensues. Julia hates her students but comes to love them. Awkwardly cute romance blossoms. Talia drops out of college. Her lame over-the-top scooter boyfriend fails to get his comeuppance. George Takai is endlessly entertaining.
First the stars. Tom Hanks. One star. Julia Roberts. One star. George Takai. One star. A bunch of other guys you will recognize and enjoy. One star. The community college kids were all freakishly accurate and well cast, according to my mother who was a community college professor for 30 years. One star. Talia was super cute. One star. Dialog was smart, clever, and well delivered. One star. The pacing was excellent, especially given the evolutionary story arc Larry Crowne went through. One star. Overall satisfying movie that literally made me feel good. One star. And finally, on more bonus star for George Takai. Total: ten stars.
Now the black holes. About half the secondary characters bordered on the annoying, including the garage sale neighbor. One black hole. The whole Talia taking a massive interest in Larry sub plot felt really forced and fake. I shouldn’t have to suspend my disbelief in a movie that doesn’t involve super powers. Also, why does she collect cool men’s clothing in Tom’s exact size and want to give them to him? One black hole. Talia boyfriend as the tough, muscled, scooter guy felt really fake too. I have known any number of scooter guys and they are, to a man (for lack of a better term), wimpy hipsters with all the muscle tone of wet spaghetti. Real tough guys buy motorcycles. One black hole. The movie hit about an 8.5 on the Sap-o-meter. One black hole. Total: five black holes.
In the irksome-but-not-black-hole-worthy category, I have a few. First of all there were a couple of scooter “gang” moments that seemed to drag on forever and also suck. Secondly, Tom couldn’t decide early on if UMart and their management was a cool and fulfilling place to work or a soulless corporate beast who’s management was comprised entirely of (white) a-holes who were looking for the flimsiest excuse to fire Larry. College as a requirement to work at a Walmart? Who are they kidding? The whole disparity in tone kind of threw me off early on. Finally, like everyone else on the planet, colleges are suffering from the budget crunch. I sincerely doubt there would be enough budget for a class called “The Art of Casual Speaking”.
So a total of 5 stars. Not bad. The actors will carry you through the movie, and you will leave the feeling with a warm feeling in your gut. I would say wait for NetFlix, but if you are looking for a date movie you literally couldn’t pick a better film. If the awkward romance between Julia and Tom doesn’t melt her heart (and put her in the mood for other things, if you know what I mean) than I would check her battery levels, as it is apparent that your date has been replaced by some kind of robot and she needs a recharge.
Movie Review: Transformers Dark of the Moon 3D
…Or, Transforming a Franchise that Sucks into Something Moderately Tolerable
Do any of you remember a couple weeks ago when I reviewed Super 8 and said the train explosion was so big it would have embarrassed Micheal Bey? I rescind that statement. There isn’t an explosion big enough for Micheal Bey. If he could figure out a way to have an explosion explode he would. I am totally convinced that if he weren’t a movie director he would be a serial arsonist.
Before I get into this review, let me reiterate this point. In Transformers Dark of the Moon EVERYTHING blows up. A snake like Decepticon punches through a corrugated steel warehouse wall. The wall blows up. An Autobot punches a concrete wall. The concrete blows up. A ship filled with giant robots who have no need whatsoever for any kind of atmosphere crashes on the airless moon and in spite of the fact that there is no oxygen present and never will be still manages to blow up in flames. In the world in Micheal Beys head everything is made of plastique, TNT, and nitroglycerin.
Anyway, the movie. Was it better than Revenge of the Fallen? Yes, but that is like asking if losing one testicle in a tragic lawn mower accident is better than two. Better does not equal good. Is it exciting and fun? Yeah, kinda. Are there any problems? Oh, yeah.
The major problem the movie suffers from is the same problem the other two suffer from: too much of the humans and not enough of the Transformers. In my mind the scenes with humans are like the “acting” scenes that clutters up otherwise perfectly good porn. You are there for one thing. I liken the scenes like Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) getting bitched out by his parents for not having a job to the scene expositions you get in video games while the next stage is loading. It can be good if you are into the story, but if not it’s a great chance to use the restroom, get a snack, and return some phone calls. This movie actually has a little more Autobot character development, but like another 30 minutes of goofy Sam-trying-to-make-his-way-in-the-world crap.
Speaking of annoying humans, Megan Fox completely flushed her own career by bitching out Michael Bey and has been replaced by the slightly less hot (I really do like brunettes) but less slutty Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who plays Sam’s love interest. It first I thought she was a slightly better actor, but then I realized I was being sucked in by her English accent. The sad fact that anyone with an English non-Cockney accent always sounds better in movies than an American. As the movie progressed I thought she might actually be another human form Transformer like in the last movie as she had a really robotic delivery. Also, her character and motivations to do anything (especially date a whiny loser like Sam Witwicky) are horribly two dimensional, and Micheal Bey might as well be shooting porn with the inventive ways he finds to linger on her body in every scene. I will be the first to admit a little eye candy can add a lot to a movie, but it seems pretty obvious to me that if Micheal Bey were not a movie director or serial arsonist he would be a stalker with a laundry list of restraining orders against him.
Anyway, the story, for lack of a better term. I won’t throw in too many spoilers, but this plot (ah ha ha ha) is so dumb you won’t miss much. Autobots have joined the CIA and are doing covert missions for the USA, or as covert as a 100 foot robot painted bright yellow or red can be. Sam has graduated college and is such a spazmo he can’t find a job (here’s a tip, kids. If you are going to a job interview with a major corporation wearing jeans and a sports coat is a bad idea, even when the job market was good). Somehow he has the hottest girl on the planet in love with him who not only gives him sex but pays all his bills. Over the last couple years of collage he did a transformation of his own, from a kind of cool kid with a cool car into a uptight, whiny bitch with a self important attitude and a tendency to occasionally turn into a loud mouth jerk who thinks yelling will do more than calling ahead. He discovers that the only job an Ivy League graduate can get is in the mail room of an accounting firm (I guess he should have done more internships) in the worst go nowhere sub plot in cinima history. In the second worst go nowhere sub plot in cinema history a fellow coworker (Ken Jeong, Mr. Chow from The Hangover) stalks him and passes on some crotch notes (no joke) about humans being killed all over the world in a homophobic scene that just drags on forever. Anyway, turns out an Autobot ship crashed on the moon and the government knew about it all along. 
They go to the moon and find Sentinel Prime (voiced by the great Leanard Nimoy. Spock image courtesy of the Star Trek T Shirts category), Optimus’s predecessor. Robot battle hijinks ensues. Most of the world blows up. Sam’s super hot girlfriend manages to avoid the advances of her boss after he gives her a $200,000 car (isn’t love grand?). Between the Autobots, Decepticons, and human military about 14 of the all time worst battle plans are devised.
The stars. Transformers. One star. Leonard Nimoy as Sentinel Prime. One star. Lots of action (the final battle seems to go for like an hour). Two stars. The action is generally great. Two stars. Great special effects and CGI. Two stars. Super hot girl on screen. One star. Alan Tudyk (Wash from Firefly) as Dutch. One star. Megatron comes back from the dead a third time, looking cooler than ever. One star. Two of my favorite Transformers, Shockwave and Soundwave, show up, although only Shockwave gets what I consider a fair treatment. One star. As worthless as his sub plot was, I always enjoy seeing John Malcovich. One star. They didn’t pull back on the killing Transformers (or, for that matter, civilian humans) although as per usual none of the main good guys died. One star. One decent plot twist. One star. Buzz Aldrin makes a cameo. One star. Total: 16 stars.
Now the black holes. Agent Simmons is back, and twice as annoying as he ever was before. One black hole. A whole slew of unnecessary and ultimately worthless sub plots and minor characters. One black hole. I will award one black hole for every ten minutes I feel the audience was subjected to of worthless human interaction (cough cough filler cough cough). Three black holes. Alan Tudyks fake German accent and dialog made me want to stuff Junior Mints into my ears until I could either hear nothing or suffered a debilitating brain aneurysm. He really isn’t great as a straight man. One black hole. More small (even smaller) really annoying comic relief Autobots who may or may not be based on racist stereotypes. Two black holes (one each). As much as I love explosions, I have to award a hole for overuse of pyrotechnics (you know, there are some circumstances where a robot can punch something and not have it blow up). One black hole. Optimus Prime is less the wise sage and more the bloodthirsty jingoist, and at one point has a little hissy fit and sulks. One black hole. Plot holes you could transport Cybertron through (wouldn’t transporting another planet into orbit around our planet more or less destroy both planets? Why say the Autobots have no way of getting off the planet when just a few minutes ago they flew one of their own ships to the moon and found an even bigger ship? If the Decepticons have been working with humans secretly for decades why did they do nothing to help Megatron the last two times he tried to take over the planet and kill the Autobots? Could they really anticipate him coming back to life three times? If every Autobot is equipped with super advanced rockets and can assault with speed why do they need a human team to sneak in and shoot the big bad thing with a lame human rocket launcher? The list goes on). One black hole. They did that thing that annoyed me so much in Battle: LA where the aliens (or in this case, robots) are unstoppable killing machines at the start but by the end of the film are getting knocked over by human spitballs and bad breath (seriously, a few special forces guys were killing them off left and right. If their plan was to conquer the planet it would seem a well equipped army could really put a hurt in their plans. Also, why is it they can shoot down aircraft with practiced ease but are unable to do anything about a few Tomahawk missiles?). One black hole. If there is one the we all learned from 9/11 it’s that buildings with breaks in the middle have little to no structural stability whatsoever. Apparently Michael Bey and all of his writers have no idea how architecture works. One black hole. There is a decided lack of concern for Sam or his girlfriend, as it is painfully obvious that nothing bad is really going to ever happen to them. This sort of action-without-consequences writing really robs the action of any of it’s punch. I would be more excited by a less epic building collapse if I believed that there was a chance someone important or that I had identified with could die. One black hole. Total: 14 black holes.
In the irksome-but-not-black-hole-worth category I have quite a few. The main one has to do with the treatment of the Decepticon characters. One of the great things about the Transformers cartoon was it really was about the Transformers, not the Autobots with the Decepticons as only their enemies. I mean, each of the Decepticons had a distinct personality that was presented almost as much as the Autobots. Megatron as the ruthless general, Starscream as the cowardly and treacherous second-in-command, Soundwave as the loyal and worthwhile minion, etc. In the movie not only is there no attempt to present any of the Decepticons as more than just spear carriers, they all even look exactly the same (silver and spikes are in this season) and are portrayed as growling, animalistic primitives. Second, there was a pretty serious death that was never even mentioned by the good guys. In fact, there was a scene that could have really impacted the audience and eliminated a lot of the action-without-consequences issues had Michale Bey had the balls to shock the audience, but he wimped out. I’m trying to stay done bitching about 3D, but the 3D effects in this movie did not really add a lot IMO. The sound track was pretty amateurish, with all the subtlety of a frying pan to the face. Also, I should have given them a black hole for stupid title of the movie. Dark of the Moon? What the hell does that mean? It’s not even acceptable grammar. I guess they couldn’t call it Dark Side of the Moon without running into Pink Floyd, but if they had all it would have taken was a little money paid to the band. Might have even helped solved some of the soundtrack issues. Also, what is the deal with Transformers aging? Do they really grow crusty beards and wrinkles as they age or were some of them built looking twice as old as the rest of them? Finally, when did Sam’s chihuahua turn in to a St. Bernard? I guess since his character had turned into such a girly man they felt he needed a more manly pet. Either that or Michael Bey thinks we are all idiots.
So, a grand total of two stars. At least they stayed positive. Will you enjoy it when you see it? Yes, probably. The more you can turn off your thinking brain and just use the stem the more you will like it. See it in 3D on the biggest screen you can find. I just don’t see this thing doing much in repeat business. By the way, there is supposed to be something after the credits, but after 157 minutes of mass explosions I had reached my sensory saturation point and bailed. I’ll YouTube it in a month.
Star Trek movie retrospective Part 4: the Voyage Home
Another decent Star Trek film. Remember last post when I said that Klingon ships were second only to the Enterprise itself? Well, in this one Kirk and crew get to fly around in one. (Voyage Home image courtesy, as always, of the Star Trek T Shirts category).
Anyway, Nimoy was approached to direct the 4th film after his success on the last one. He came up with a pro environment story with no real villain. Paramount brought in the great Nick Meyer to help write parts of the screenplay. The film came out in November of 1986 and was generally a success.
What was happening in 1986? Well, I was a senior in high school and the first glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel made it slightly more bearable. However, the year before I had broken my kneecap, which pretty much took me off the wrestling team, which I loved and was pretty much the only slice of cool I had in my high school experience. I also managed to develop type 1 diabetes (the kind you get from genetics, not from being a fat bastard), which was hugely complicated, dangerous, and squashed my original plans to join the Marine Corps after graduation, something I had wanted to do ever since I was a kid. I was past the suicide planning freshman and sophomore years and the homicidal “I’m going to kill everyone in my school and stand around laughing while the parents came to claim the bodies” junior year (one of many dark periods of my life). I was feeling as good as I ever was in high school, and the only thing I was doing was cutting a little. In an ironic blast from the past the US bombed Libya, Chernobyl blows up, the first bits of Glasnost happens, Halley’s Comet approaches and fails to blow up the planet in spite of many doomsday predictions, seven million Americans hold (hopefully recently washed) hands in the “Hands Across America” event, an earthquake in El Salvador kills 1500, Ollie North gets caught in the Iran-Contra Affair, Mad Cow Disease is identified in the UK, Mike Tyson becomes heavyweight champion of the world, the smoking ban is lowered on all planes, trains, and buses to much whining from nicotine hounds, space shuttle Challenger blows up (I cried) and leads to a number of really bad jokes (I laughed), Intel releases the 386 processing chip, the worlds first laptop comes out, and the nicotine patch was invented.
In movies it definitely wasn’t the great year 1984 was. Besides the Voyage Home, the only movies really worth noting were Alien (Sigourney Weaver in her underwear!), Platoon (not TOO depressing), Top Gun (adrenaline fueled recruitment movie), and Crocodile Dundee (suddenly Australia seemed cool). In TV the A Team, Cheers, and Magnum PI were on the good side, but on the bad side we had Growing Pains (groaning pains), Murder She Wrote (how many murders does a writer encounter in a life time? Also, why didn’t one of the hundreds of murderers she ran into just put a bullet in her?), Remington Steele (pretty boy solves crimes before becoming 007), and the Cosby Show (Bill Cosby shows us how be be good parents. Actually helped drive home how messed up my own family life was, so thanks Bill). Music more or less sucked. Pet Shop Boys, Culture Club, Madonna, and the Bangles (Walk Like an Egyptian) to name a few.
I’d like to say culturally we were ready for another Star Trek film, but by then it was pretty much a franchise and the studio was going to crank out a sequel if the entire planet were about to fall into a black hole.
Anyway, Kirk and crew are headed back to Earth to pay for the crimes they committed resurrecting Spock. They are headed to Earth in their stolen Bird-of-Prey but it’s 2286 and time for the human race to pay for past sins, specifically in the extinction of the hump back whale. This is less like delivering a message as it is having the message and six of his friends come over to your house and beat you with sand filled rubber hoses. An alien probe comes to Earth looking for the whales and is going to more or less wreak the planet until they are found. Apparently the sound the whales makes travels through the airless void of space and is picked up by the aliens. Kirk and crew decide they can travel back in time and scoop up a couple. They land in San Francisco, where the more or less abuse the timeline and completely ignore the temporal prime directive. I’m no scientist, but I would think doing stuff like kidnapping whales (with tracking devices on them), giving some local yahoo the secret of transparent aluminum, and taking a whale biologist forward in time just might have an effect on the timeline. Talk about the Butterfly Effect. Anyway, awkward people-from-the-future-trying-to-fit-in hijinks ensues. Chekov asks around for nuclear wessels. Spock acts spacy and disjointed. McCoy has a fit about the primitiveness of 20th century surgical techniques. Kirk insults the Mormon church. Scotty turns into the temporal rogue planetoid (and is the size of a planetoid) and more or less hands out advanced technology left and right. Chekov, forever the show whipping boy, gets run down by military police and ends up in the hospital, just like on the show. Sulu manages to figure out how to fly a Huey helicopter. I guess all that time spent flying around space with no gravity teaches you a lot about dealing with the most complicated flying machine of our modern world. Whales get tracked down by the chip in their heads. They get dumped off in the San Francisco Bay (just a few miles from my house) and everything is hunky dory.
What the movie had:
Spock with more than two speaking lines. A lot of really good humor. All the rest of the original crew. Some headache inducing time paradox questions. Time travel as a plot device. The line “nuclear wessels”. A Klingon Bird-of-Prey. Whales. A court martial.
What it didn’t have:
Cool space battles. Aliens. An epic fight scene. A hot Vulcan girl (or any other hot girls, for that matter).
Like the last movie, this one raised some serious questions for me. For example:
If Kirk sold off his antique glasses in the past and then reacquired them again in the future, where did they come from originally? Were they the spontaneously manifesting plot device? Also, if they more or less gained 300 years every time they went through the cycle, wouldn’t they eventually just be a small pile of decayed metal dust and ground up glass?
How exactly did Sulu know how to fly a Huey? I’m not kidding, a helicopter is godawfully complicated, and hovering carrying huge loads is one of the hardest things to do with one. If you took a modern pilot and transported him 300 years into the past, putting him in a clipper ship he might be able to figure out how to pilot in a given direction, but the finer aspects of navigating reefs and so one would most likely be beyond him. Also, wouldn’t he need to show a pilots license of some kind when they rented it?
I get that they dropped the plexiglass plates into Bird-of-Prey with the helicopter, but how did they get it into the craft? Did the Klingons build a huge cargo bay or perhaps retractable sun roof into their ship, or did Scotty rip the roof off the ship and then later rivet it back on? Also, once they got the plates into the ship, how did they maneuver them into place? Each one of them should have weighed several tons. For that matter, what part of their plan required them to be able to see the whales during the 40 minute flight from Earth to future Earth? Couldn’t they have just used steel plates and not had to deal? If it were me, I would have welded the cargo bay shut and just parked the whales in there, not having do deal with any of these weird materials at all.
If they brought forth two whales, a male and a female, in order to propagate the species and keep the aliens from destroying the planet, aren’t they all worried about the third generation being all inbred weird finger mutant babies when the brothers and sisters mate? Also, what if the two whales have all male of female kids? As my PHD geneticist friend tells me, any species that is reduced to even a couple hundred specimens is effectively dead from a genetic point of view. I mean, a couple hundred years down the road wouldn’t the aliens be like “Wow, these whale calls we are getting sound kind of weird and disjointed. They all sound of inbred.” Sounds like a temporary fix to me.
If the cloaked Bird-of-Prey is approaching the whales and those whales are being hunted by whalers, why was it necessary to decloak the ship to scare the whalers and piss on the temporal prime directive even more before transporting the whales on board? Couldn’t they have just transported the whales on board and left the whalers going “Hey, where did those whales go?”?
If the whales were moving at speed when they transported up onto the ship into the small tank wouldn’t they have kept their momentum and bonked their heads into the front of the tank? Plexiglass isn’t that strong. Also, shouldn’t they have been totally freaked out and gone into a massive thrashing fit, possibly injuring each other?
Scotty puts the formula for transparent aluminum onto the computer screen and then (apparently) labels it “Transparent Aluminum”. The plexiglass sales guy takes one three second look at it and has a spontaneous orgasm. Is he a super genius in chemistry and strength of materials and can interpret that stuff instantly? Wouldn’t he want to test it before giving away tens of thousands of dollars worth of plexiglass? How does he know that Scotty isn’t some kind of industrial spy and just gave him a formula that the patent office is three days away from awarding to DuPont? Or for that matter just threw a bunch of random chemical crap on the screen?
Can anyone walk into an emergency room and take over the surgical theater for a critically injured person, asking for stuff that doesn’t really exist yet and bitching out the doctors present for their primitive techniques? Don’t any of the other doctors or nurses more or less know everyone who works there? Also, wasn’t Chekov a prisoner of the Marines who captured him? Wouldn’t they want to at least speak to McCoy first before granting access to their suspected Russian spy?
Anyway, the list goes on. Still, in spite of the weird holes in the plot and the never ending questions, the movie was fun and enjoyable. In retrospect I found the pro environment message pretty didactic and annoying, and the lack of anything action related can make for a slow movie. However, I loved it because was the movie that was most like the TV show. They had a goal. There were weird complications that required unusual stuff (like collecting radiation from nuclear wessels). Some humorous moments. Kirk being Kirk. Spock being Spock. All around a nice flashback episode.
That’s it for this one. Before I go I’d like to mention that I saw a great Tron tribute video by a guy named Anthony Scott Burns called Tron Destiny. Worth checking out IMO.
With luck next post will be a modern movie (couch cough Bad Teacher cough cough). I’m looking forward reviewing the new Transformers movie too, but have heard some negative reviews so my expectations for Michael Bey remain at my usual level. See you soon!
