The Holocaust was not one of humanity's proudest moments, or it is, if you think we're only capable of committing evil shit to our fellow innocents. You read about some of the horrific shit these assholes did in service to that one-testicle-having cocksucking piece-of-shit vegetarian and you wouldn't believe any of it, if it wasn't for the fact that it really did happen (unless you're Mel Gibson's dad or someone like that, then no, you wouldn't believe it). But when it comes to the Toy Holocaust, though, you might as well call me Bobby Fischer because that shit? Never fucking happened.
I don't give a fuck what The Nutcracker in 3D aka We Fucked Up So Badly With This Movie That We Had To Hold It Back For A Year So We Could Convert It Into 3D And Change The Title So It Reflects That It Was Always Intended To Be In 3D is trying to tell you, that's part of the fuckin' Toy Conspiracy. They control everything, these Toys, they control the media with all the commercials and ads for Toys R Us, making people think that we need Toys for our kids. They make movies like Toy Story 3 that are outright fallacies created to make us feel sorry for them. The shopping malls used to be havens for bookstores like B. Dalton and Crown Books, it was their rightful place. Then the goddamn Toy stores came in and took it over, kicking them out or putting them out of business. Now the book stores are relegated to doing business outside of the malls; Barnes & Noble can only find a home in shitty shopping centers, sometimes having to coexist in a symbiotic state with Starbucks in order to get by.
According to this film of lies, some guy named The Rat King took over with his Nazi Rat stormtroopers and they rounded up all the toys and piled them up. Then they would pick up all the toys and dump them at the Smoke Factory, a crematorium where the toys are burned and giant plumes of smoke fill the sky (the Rat King loves smoke and hates toys -- it's a 2 Birds 1 Stone deal for him). I don't know who this Rat King was, but it's probably bullshit, because the only Rat King I know of was the dude from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and he wasn't so much evil as he was just a creepy motherfucker. The Rat King in this movie, on the other hand, is one of those evil & fey motherfuckers; he's played by Andy Warhol but they misspell his name in the credits as John Turturro, a fine actor who would never lower himself to acting in this garbage just to collect a paycheck, therefore sullying a spotless Curriculum Vitae that included such productions as You Don't Mess With The Zohan and the Transformers trilogy.
What a piece of shit this Rat King is! He's dressed like a Bond Villain and he even has a shark tank in his lair, which he then proceeds to electrocute for shits & giggles, dancing and singing about the "thousand-year" empire he has created, while poor Jaws is floating lifelessly in the water for everyone to see. The one cool thing about him is that he has a mural in his hallway that is made up of close-up pictures of crying children, that was pretty awesome. Whenever he has the opportunity, he will snap candids of sad kids on the street; they are to him, what I think sunsets are to me. In addition to his Nazi Rat stormtroopers, he has packs of robot Rat Dogs that sniff out Toys and Toy Sympathizers and dig holes where they need to be dug. Rat-Faced Nazi Warhol also has his 2 best minions flying around in winged jet-packs, looking like Michael Ironside's 2 minions from Highlander II: The Quickening. There's also the Rat Queen, some old hag who looks really disgusting and disturbing (like most of us will look when we get old) and that's before you realize she's wearing stripper boots and whore stockings.
The liberal Toy-run media try to soften the Lie Hammer by presenting this as some kind of dream world, and meanwhile, in the real world, we have Nathan Lane hamming it the fuck up as Albert Einstein. They never actually say it's Albert Einstein; his nephew calls him "Uncle Albert" but you know it's him. He's got the hair and he's also got the douchey habit of writing E=MC2 on his nephew's kids' blackboard, in case you (or they) weren't aware of who the fuck he was. And even then, he will insist on singing some bullshit song about how Everything is Relative. Oh yeah, there's singing; this is kind of a musical, as something called The Nutcracker would tend to be. To my knowledge, The Nutcracker is a magical ballet with beautiful music composed by Tchaikovsky but in this film version, those sneaky crafty Toy people decide to shit on it by including retard lyrics by Tim Rice, who must have written this shit following a stroke that rendered him incapable of having talent.
Oh, that lovable Uncle Albert, with his Fuck Realism accent and his occasional breaking of the fourth wall by addressing the audience! He comes over to his nephew's house (nephew played by Withnail, house played by a soundstage in Hungary) to watch over his nephew's kids and to give them Christmas gifts. The kids are a brother & sister duo; the sister is a nice girl played by Elle Fanning and the brother is a fucking asshole played by I Don't Know And I Don't Care. This fucking asshole kid brother likes to break and destroy shit; he takes the fairy from the beautiful Christmas tree that was just put up and tries to burn it at the fireplace, just because he felt the need to, I guess. Later, Uncle Albert gives Elle a Nutcracker doll as a gift and Fucking Asshole Kid Brother breaks the jaw off of it. Elle understandably freaks out, and Fucking Asshole Kid's response is "Just a stupid toy!" and I'm like "And you're just a stupid mistake who only exists because you have wire-hanger-dodging abilities".
The way the Nutcracker doll is introduced, you'd think you were watching a horror film. The fuckin' thing looks scary with its creepy demon soul-sucking eyeballs; you half-expect Uncle Albert to tell a tale about the killer Nutcracker who comes alive to slaughter bad little boys by living up to it's name, so be good for goodness sake! At the very least, it would look right at home in a circa 1970's Dario Argento joint. It eventually grows to human size and begins to talk (voice supplied by this chick who played Moaning Myrtle in the Harry Potter movies but much much more importantly, was in Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day) and takes Elle on a magical journey of amazement and wonderment and other shit like that.
Actually, it's kinda cool because somehow the Christmas tree in the house is now over 200 feet tall and it reaches towards the starry night sky and you can climb it to the very top. On the way up, NC (that's what the Nutcracker prefers to be called and it's also a way to make all this shit more Hip and Now to the young kids today -- yo yo yo, NC is in the hizzy!) and Elle Fanning run into some suicidal Russians who happily throw themselves off the tree. I think that kinda kills the tree-climbing mood for them, so NC & Elle decide to take a flying sleigh (or something) the rest of the way. At one point, NC turns to her and remarks "You're very pretty" and the way he says it and the way he's shot when he says it, led me to believe that in another five minutes he's going to be dragging the poor girl's mutilated remains in a bag, on the way to the fireplace to be disposed of. It would later be found out that the Nutcracker Killer was responsible for a rash of similarly gruesome murders of similarly Elle Fanning-esque victims who were all similarly dressed like 80's-era Madonna.
NC doesn't do that, though. Instead, he introduces her to the Sugar Plum Fairy and for a brief moment we hear that lovely Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy song and then suddenly here comes that fucking Shit Singing again. I want to hear this beautiful music, but the assholes on-screen insist on singing these fuckin' precious lyrics over it. Shut the fuck up! Nobody shuts the fuck up; if they're not singing bullshit, they're talking bullshit. NC invites Elle to the doll house where he resides and the tenants are making a goddamn racket; you have a monkey man named Gielgud (named after the actor who would turn this shit down if he was still alive to do so), a morbidly obese gay clown (singing Pagliacci, natch), and a Jamaican kid who apparently doesn't want to work because all he does is bang on his fuckin' drums all day (NC refers to Rasta Boy as being "the least reliable" which to me sounds like code for "Blacks Be Lazy" -- another tactic of the Toy Conspiracy is to create racial strife where none exists, the better to control us).
Eventually, Elle joins NC on a quest to fight back against the Rat King's reign of terror; the Asshole Kid Brother gets involved, toys are getting burned, some motherfucker's head gets torn off of his fucking body (it's a family film!), Gielgud hurts his balls and exclaims "Oh my bananas!" (because he's a monkey, you see), there are Prince of Darkness-style mirrors that lead to the other side, and the climax involves explosions and toppling buildings and fuckin' Rat-Faced Nazi Warhol flies a helicopter that I swear was inspired by Opa-Opa from the Fantasy Zone video game. In other words, it's EXACTLY like the ballet it was based on, they didn't try updating it or making it more exciting for the kids. Sigmund Freud is in there somewhere as well, just so Elle's mom could say something like "Maybe Freud was right about..." and Withnail cuts her off with something like "Shut the fuck up about Sigmund Freud, bitch! FUCK Sigmund Freud and FUCK his coked-up bullshit!". I'm paraphrasing.
Now that I've established that this movie is Toy Propaganda comprised of lies, I will discuss its quality. It's a weird movie, really fuckin' weird; I can't say it's bad, but it sure as fuck ain't anywhere near the vicinity of Good. I'm watching this and I'm numb to it all; I see the Christmas trees and lights and hear the music, and yet I feel no holiday spirit. The characters are making lots of noise and some of the proceedings have the appearance of humor without actually being funny. The music from the original ballet is great, while the singing is ugh. The movie works best when it's scaring the shit out of you with insane moments like when the Rat King is speeding down a sewer in his Ratcycle, firing twin Gatling guns at the good guys, while his Rat Mouth suddenly transforms into a horrific mutated monster version of Rat Fangs as he screams wildly. Goddamn, that would scare any kid, except for that kid with leukemia who sells pictures online of monsters he likes to draw, because he's not scared of monsters, he loves them -- except for the monsters currently living inside his body, eating him alive.
But was that the intent, to make a horror show disguised as a family film? I don't know. Part of me thinks the writer/director wanted to make an update of a holiday classic, he wanted to make it great, something the whole family would enjoy and perhaps watch every year. Instead, somewhere along the way, his admirable goal became a bad idea and this motherfucker kept zigging when he should've been zagging. Perhaps he lost his way, and the results are Massive Fail. If that's the case, I want to say to him "How could you do me like this, Andrei Konchalovsky? You directed Runaway Train. Muthafuckin' Runaway Train! That's one of my favorite movies of all time! Sure, you also made Tango & Cash and it's a shit movie but it's a fun shit movie and I gave you props for that, but since then I don't know what the fuck happened to you, bro. I feel like Samuel L. Jackson in Jackie Brown and you're Robert De Niro. What the fuck happened, man? Your ass used to be beautiful!"
And yet part of me thinks this was all intentional, and maybe Konchalovsky wanted to compete in the WTF division with the big boys. Maybe he got tired of making respectable awesome shit like Runaway Train and Maria's Lovers and Siberiade. He got a taste of the good stuff with Tango & Cash, but then he got fired from the picture, and he's been steaming ever since. He's like "I'll show you some fuckin' unintentional good times, I'll show you what I'm made of!" in a thick Russian accent. Motherfucker then took this classic tale of The Nutcracker, threw a live grenade down its pants, and shoved it down the stairs -- the results being muthafuckin' F.U.B.A.R., big time. If that's the case, then I want to shake the motherfucker's hand for doing it this way, for quite possibly being the maddest Russian genius who ever lived since muthafuckin' Rasputin.
I was all alone in the theater during this movie, which is awesome for me but not-awesome for the film's financiers. I try not to bother with the shitty upconversion 3D flicks; only animated films look best in that format. Live-action 3D only looks good when shot with 3D cameras, like Avatar and Resident Evil: Afterlife. But since I was so interested in seeing a new Andrei Konchalovsky film play on the big screen (he made Runaway Train, people!), and since they were only showing it in 3D, I gave it a shot.
Well, it looked just as shitty as the other upconverted flicks; the characters looked unnatural, they either looked like someone was standing directly behind them or their faces looked weird because their nose is like, right in front of you and their eyes are all the way back, giving the impression that a side profile would reveal the person to have an unnaturally horizontally-elongated head. After the movie ended, after sitting through the end credits -- the best part of the film, by the way, because it's the only time you can hear Tchaikovsky's music without someone singing over it -- I left the auditorium and dumped my RealD glasses inside the recycle bin they have in front (those things cost money, you know). Those glasses sounded so lonely when they landed at the very bottom of that very empty bin.
There's a scene near the end of this film, where Elle's character slides down a chute and lands in a pile of dolls and toys. She's in the belly of the beast, the Smoke Factory. Up ahead, she sees NC (who's unconscious or dead or something) on the conveyor belt that leads to the incinerator. I hadn't been this caught up in a cinematic predicament like this since watching Andrew McCarthy try to save Kim Cattrall from a similar fate in Mannequin. Anyway, she quietly sneaks toward the conveyor belt, so as not to alert the nearby guards. The shot that follows is from behind her, as she crawls on her hands and knees with her skirt hiked up -- we're basically looking at underage girl ass now -- while on the other side of the frame we see NC and a bunch of other toys headed for fiery death. That shot? That's the movie in a nutshell.
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