We do not want you here. We do not like you.

“Oh my goodness you like those kinds of movies? I can maybe watch one but that's it.”

             
                  -- a text message from my sister, referring to either 
                     the Saw movies or girl-on-girl porn

A few years ago -- during a break at either the New Beverly Cinema's All Night Horror Show or the Aero Cinematheque's Horrorthon -- a buddy of mine brought up the idea of having a Saw marathon. I had only seen the first one while he hadn't seen a single one, so we decided to have our back-to-back night of torture porn goodness as soon as the filmmakers and/or Lionsgate called it quits with those shits. Well, as of last October, the Saw machine has stopped -- for now. Because something tells me that much like the Halloween movies and the Friday the 13th movies, the Saw movies will pull a Chev Chelios in that they'll get better after dying.

Like that first-wife-beating, first-child-ignoring, asshole musical genius once said: Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans, and that's what kept us from setting up our evening of Saw at first, but eventually the night finally came and I had already acquired the entire series earlier that week from my awesome neighbor, a hard-working family man who not only gives good firearms conversation and hooks me up with free quality bread (rye! sourdough! bagels! I'm super fat!), he evidently also likes to unwind after a hard day's work by watching people scream in pain as they try to get through astonishingly baroque traps left by some sanctimonious asshole, hence his owning all seven Saw films.

After snatching said Saw series, I then rushed off to 7-11 for a couple bottles of Vitamin Water and some chips, then stopped over at Cigar Castle to buy a couple of choice stogies, while my wife LeEtta picked up some pizzas from the local -- oh, wait a minute, that's the other guy, not me. My bad. I get really confused sometimes. Two of my buddies showed up to give me some company, but more importantly, they brought Cherry Coke.

SPOILERS, LITTLE GIRL, SPOILERS

The first film was indeed Saw, about two guys -- a Brit and an Aussie -- trapped in an abandoned bathroom (really?) and trying their absolute fuckin' hardest to speak with convincing American accents without slipping into one of those odd Tim Roth-in-Reservoir Dogs voices. They also each have an ankle chained to the bathroom pipes, there's a bloody dead guy in the middle of the room, and oh yeah, then they find out that one has to kill the other by 6:00, so yeah, there's that too.

Most of the film consists of flashbacks about how they ended up in this predicament, as well as cutting to scenes involving a detective played by Danny Glover, and because he hasn't yet declared that he's approached an age in which he should no longer get involved in stressful/overly demanding situations, he's gathering an increase in heat on the trail of the "Jigsaw Killer"; some asshole who is kidnapping other assholes and placing them in these horrific traps that require these assholes to make some fucked up choices if they want to survive -- the idea being that they'll come out of it as former assholes, if they live through the ordeal. Anyway, turns out that our two wannabe American-speakers are the latest potential victims/survivors of Jigsaw's latest trap.

I've seen Saw once before in 2005, in its R-rated DVD incarnation, and I remember liking it even though the pacing got a tad protracted at times, like the filmmakers forgot the movie's called Saw, not Saaaaaawwwww. But the stuff that works in the film, really fuckin' works and overall it was a decent flick. The performances are pretty good; Danny Glover's got a nice dual mode going on here, first he's kind of an overly-assured dude who thinks he's got it all figured out, and then once he watches the karaoke salesman from Keeping the Faith get multiple-shotgun-blasted, he becomes Mr. Obsessed, and you get the sense that sleeping, eating and bathing are all low-priority for him from here on out.

Then there's Cary Elwes, who's pretty awesome here in that he's kinda like a subtle William Shatner at times, doing this whole ACTING! deal with his character. It's like he's an old fat English theater actor stuck inside a leading man's body (albeit a slightly plump leading man, but fuck that shit, the dude is getting older and a motherfucker's metabolism slows down with age, so give homie a break, don't hate on the motherfucker just because he doesn't look exactly like Westley anymore. Jesus tap-dancin' Christ, people).

The strongest scene for me was actually one that didn't involve any traps, it involved a gun being held to a frightened little girl's head while the sick fuck holding the gun listens to her heartbeat with a stethoscope -- that shit is so brilliantly ill, that if I were to ever meet director James Wan or writer Leigh Whannell, I'll have to buy them a fuckin' drink for coming up with it, even though they probably have more money than I do. I'd also buy the little girl a drink for her way-too-convincing performance in that scene, except that shit would probably get me locked up and/or a visit by that ultra-smug motherfucker who judges son/daughterfuckers with his Beacon Of Moral Purity act on television while cheating on his wife behind closed doors, but I'm not hating because that shit's between consenting adults, not a kid and some creep with fucked-up wiring. Fuck it, it doesn't have to be alcohol, I'll buy her a Yoo-Hoo or something.

All the events of this movie appear to take place in the same shitty 2-block radius somewhere in downtown Los Angeles, and aside from the now-iconic bathroom set, most of this movie looks fuckin' El Cheapo; the doctor's office in this flick, shit man, it looks like the set probably still reeked of semen and sweaty asses from the previous film that was shot there.I guess most of the budget went to scoring Danny Glover, Cary Elwes, and the chick who got blasted by a shotgun-wielding psycho in the family comedy Patch Adams and they didn't have much left for sets that didn't look like some rejected shit from a circa 1991 Don "The Dragon" Wilson joint.

Let me Tarantino this shit back to shortly after the first film's theatrical release, when I spoke to a guy who worked on Saw Uno and potentially could've hooked me up with some work, had I not slipped on a banana peel and fell straight into a pool of laziness and alcoholism. I remember two things from our conversation: first, he was very amused at the sight of the young Asian director speaking with a straight-up Fosters Beer/shrimp on the barbie accent (I guess he didn't know about the large Asian population Down Under) and second, the crew worked for very little money and put in some serious fuckin' overtime, yet he Just Fucking Knew that rather than reward said crew by keeping the sequel local, the producers were going to take that shit to Canada in order to minimize costs and maximize wallet girth. Sure enough, the motherfucker was right because the rest of the series was shot in Toronto -- they didn't even try to pull a Police Academy and take that shit back to L.A. for a couple sequels and throw a couple bones to some locals, they just fuckin' stayed up north, makin' that money, eatin' Tim Hortons, sippin' Purple Chango.

Back to our movie night; Saw II was next and in this one, Donnie Wahlberg plays one of those hardcore tough-guy detectives, and he's so grizzled and beaten-by-life that he doesn't even have time to get his clothes pressed and I think he must've lost a lot of weight recently because he's a baggy outfit-wearing motherfucker. But then again, he probably buys his shit from one of those places where you can get 3 suits for $100, and the off-the-rack joints tend to not be the best fitting, but hey, what can you do, the funeral's tomorrow and you can't show up in your 1989 Saturday night party borderline-Cosby sweater, just 'cause it's the closest thing to respectable in your closet, and surely you can't show up wearing one of your ironic hipster unicorn tees, nobody's that big of an asshole.

Anyway, he has one of those douchebag teenage sons who's always getting into trouble, and rather than break out the fuckin' Boone's Farm wine and celebrate after his son ditches him to run to Mommy's, he's all fucked up because he loves his son and all of that bullshit. But because this shit's called Saw II and not How To Make Your Douchebag Son Understand You, Plot Point #1 peeks its ugly head and it turns out Jigsaw's behind the little brat's disappearance, and even though Donnie has that fine Dizzy Flores and a crew of hardcore SWAT motherfuckers from the Vaguely-Canadian Police Department backing him up, Mr. Saw's holding all the cards in that warehouse hideout of his. You see, J. Saw has a bunch of monitors displaying a video feed from some unknown location, where a group of strangers have just woken up to find out they're J-Sizzy's latest "test subjects", and Probably Still A Virgin is among them.

This flick's a little flashier than the last one (which was mostly flashy with the edits as a way to disguise some low-budget shit), but I didn't mind; I remember reading lots of hate online at the time, regarding what they considered to be unnecessarily flamboyant camera moves & seizure-inducing editing during some of the trap scenes, and I'd have to disagree with them. See, I think the point of doing that was to get you into the mindset of the victim as he or she becomes increasingly panicked/frustrated/anguish as they try to get out of the trap, which is made worse by the victims knowing that they don't have forever to be careful about this shit, because they're on the clock, bitch, and midnight is coming.

I'd say overall, this one's about even with the first and it could've been better except this shit has it's own flaws to keep it from surpassing the original, like the raza with big arms who's just mean & evil because you need someone mean & evil to fuck shit up. But I did like that the sequel had a way fuckin' faster pace to it, and I preferred the interactions between Jigsaw & Marky Mark's brother in this flick over Cary Elwes & Leigh Whannell's slightly accented shenanigans in the previous joint.

All kidding about being Marky Mark's brother aside, I gotta give it up to Donnie Wahlberg for playing his character in the first third of the film as some generic hardass, and then spending the rest of the film with increasingly watery eyeballs after discovering about his son's current situation, while still trying to put the fear of having a motherfucker feel the vibrations into Jigsaw (and failing miserably, because Jigsaw knows what the fuck is up, now that Donny Don's revealed some serious vulnerabilities).

They get into Jigsaw's medical condition (he's got the big Casino) and how he's taking it out on people who aren't fully appreciating their lives in various ways; he'd probably disagree, though, saying that he's not on some vengeful wrath deal, but rather, he's giving them an opportunity to be "reborn". By the way, if I'm mixing any of this shit up, please forgive me, I watched all 7 flicks in a row and it gets to a point that with enough time, enough lack-of-sleep, and enough marijuana, one can easily confuse-o-blend these movies into one bloody, rusty, green-tinted slurpee of cheap sets, awesome gore and B & C-level actors.

I'm not a fan of the term "torture porn" -- even though I had no problem using it like 2 or 3 times already -- and I didn't consider the first Saw an example of T.P., because you're with the characters and you're feeling their pain and you don't want a motherfucker to saw his foot off, even though the titular tool hangs over the entire film like a threat that will eventually be carried out. But hey, that's not torture porn, that's good filmmaking.

And that's the main problem with Saw II -- there's a slight lack of said good filmmaking, causing this shit to feel rather torture porny at times because I didn't give a shit about most of the victims, I'm really just watching these people get owned for the fun of watching them get owned, rather than getting emotionally involved in their plight. I only cared for two people: Shawnee Smith's character, because she had already gone through this shit in the last movie (and because she's cute) and homeboy from South Central (or as some of you might know him as, Tuneman from Speed and Speed 2: Cruise Control).

It was interesting watching this movie with a friend who does not like anything remotely scary; when I heard she was coming over, I didn't believe it. This is the same girl who would not go to the horror movie marathons at the Aero and New Bev, and here she was watching her some Saw. Turns out the hardest part of watching the Saw movies for her was the music, particularly with the first one, because that really creeped her out. The music is definitely The Most, particularly that track called "Hello Zepp", because by the third film, my buddies and I realized that whenever that tune came on, it meant the movie was about to drop some heavy fuckin' science on the viewer (not to mention the unsuspecting on-screen characters). 

Saw III was next, and I want to bring up that the extended director's cut wasn't available, so instead we watched the unrated cut of the theatrical edit, which I found out later wasn't missing anything worth not missing, aside from a catfight that would've been cool to watch because two chicks fighting is always a good thing because, you know, they might get it on or something -- but hey, a rough version of that scene is on the unrated DVD extras; it's awesome in a watching-women's-tennis-with-your-eyes-closed kinda way because one chick pushes the other against the wall and there's a lot of groaning/moaning/panting going on and now I have to take a break to watch it again. 

Speaking of chicks getting physical, there's a scene involving Shawnee Smith getting the absolute shit beat out of her by Donny Don -- beaten with a large pipe! punched in the face! slammed repeatedly against a wall! -- and rather than keel over and piss herself like Kurt Russell's not-really daughter in that movie The Chris Brown Inside Me or whatever that shit was called, she takes her lumps like a fuckin' champ and gives just as good as she gets.

Sheeeeeiiiiiiit, I couldn't take nearly as much of a beating as she did, probably because I'm not a fictional character in a movie that stretches credibility tighter than a drum set made out of Joan Rivers' skin, but whatever, she looks pretty badass with her crazy hair and leather coat and blood dripping from her face, looking like some punky female Parker in a movie no one would ever make, on account of Hollywood being run by pussies (or Jews, if you're Mel Gibson). Sure, there's Anna Karina in Made in U.S.A., but that was made by Jean-Luc Godard, back when he was beginning to dabble in his now-permanent I Like Being An Antagonizing Contrarian Dickwad Who Thinks He's Better Than Everything phase, so I don't count that shit.
 
What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the unrated cut. It's the longest of the series at 113 minutes, while the director's cut is just a shade over two hours and while I'm usually all about the director's vision, c'mon man -- it's Saw III, not The Bridge on the River Kwai, so trim that bitch down, chief. Save the indulgences for your cult rock operas. Anyway, we watched the unrated 113-minute cut, that's what I was trying to say.

So in this one, it looks like that fine Dizzy Flores is gonna be the Main Dude/Obsessed Cop here, taking over for Danny Glover and Come On Come On Feel The Vib-- Oh I'm Sorry, That's My Brother You're Thinking Of. But goddammit, they tricked me because poor Dizzy can't catch a break in these goddamn movies, she's always meat wagon material, but at least she always goes out hard: she's either getting eaten or impaled or power-drilled through the eyeball, and in this flick she gets her fuckin' ribcage torn open, causing her guts to plop down on the ground, plus she's barefoot, so she's probably really cold too. Anyway, she and Michelle Rodriguez need to do a buddy cop movie or something where it ends with everyone BUT their characters getting killed, leaving our dynamic duo as the only ones left alive, because that would be a change for them, you see.

The filmmakers cruelly decided not to make Saw III about an attractive detective, and instead made it about Low-Budget Russell Crowe looking all bloated and assed-out because his dumbass son rode his bike onto oncoming traffic. He ends up getting Jigsaw'd into yet another abandoned building (because a Saw movie without an abandoned building is like a day without sunshine), only instead of getting thrown into some elaborate trap and being forced make the decision to live or die, he's thrown into a series of traps, and it's not his life he's playing with, it's the lives of the people who were somehow involved with his son's first-and-only-date with 4 Firestone tires: the witness to the accident (she ran away from the scene), the judge (he gave the driver a light sentence), and the vehicular manslaughter himself (the recipient of said light sentence -- but why did it have to be a brotha? Movie's racist, yo, racist, call Al Sharpton). Oh yeah, there's also some doctor chick who's being forced to delay Jigsaw's inevitable death-by-Cancer, or else the armed shotgun-shell collar she's wearing will go off and give her face a 12-gauge bukkake.

Because this one wasn't nearly as freight train-paced as Saw Dos, it took a bit getting used to at first, but eventually my patience paid off because this ended up being the best of the first 3 flicks; it has the most fucked-up traps, it has some great shit between all the characters (particularly anything involving Evil Chick getting physical with Victim Chick), and acting-wise these motherfuckers Brought It. Visually there's a lot of cool transitions between scenes where the camera moves from one location to another in the same shot; they're very reminiscent of a film directed by actor Saul Rubinek called Jerry and Tom, so it must be a Canadian thing, these awesome scene transitions. There's titties in this movie too -- the only titties in the entire series, I believe -- but it's during a torture trap scene and I don't know about you pervs but it's hard for me to get hard watching a woman screaming bloody murder as she freezes to death.

Also, I heard that part II was originally written as a stand-alone movie (which was then rewritten to fit the Saw universe), but I think this flick could easily have been it's own thing as well, because what you have here is a solid entry in the Revenge Ain't What It's Cracked Up To Be sub-genre of vengeance flicks: you have this dude, this Low-Budget Russell Crowe, who has so much anger and anguish (his drinking certainly doesn't help that shit) and suddenly he has the people he holds responsible for his current residence in Sucks To Be Me-ville handed to him on a rusty silver platter, about to die painful, horrible deaths, and all he has to do is....absolutely nothing.

But because Man is a complex beast, it turns out that letting them die is far easier said than done and now this fuckin' guy actually finds himself considering not only saving them from their plight, but considering making the necessary sacrifices that are required in order to save them (one trap involves him having to incinerate his dead son's stuffed animals and pictures in order to find a key that will save someone's life) -- and while he's racking his brain on this whole forgive/not forgive angle, his victims are currently being frozen/drowned/twisted to death in the slowest way possible.

I don't know how, but in this one I actually fuckin' cared for all the characters, even the assholes, even Jigsaw. Life is a motherfucker, is what this movie seems to be saying (because everyone in this movie has been motherfucked by Life), but goddammit, it's sure as fuck better than Death (especially Death by Freezing) and you only make things worse when trying to add Revenge into the mix. You gotta let that shit go, folks; I don't wanna be the one to tell you how it's gotta be, but livin' is the only way you're ever really gonna see. That's right, motherfuckers, I just invoked the Joe Public rule on all your asses.

It's kind of telling, I think, that while the rest of the Saws average about 90+ minutes, this one was a lot longer. I mean, considering all the shit that gets touched upon in this particular entry, and consider how this particular entry ends, and while you're still considering on those two things, consider this shit too: this was the last Saw that Leigh Whannell & James Wan were involved with writing-wise. They were probably hedging their bets with this one, wrapping it up in such a manner that this could also work as the last Saw movie ever made -- that is, if the grosses don't meet expectations.

Except the grosses DID meet expectations, not only that, they fuckin' surpassed said expectations, leaving the filmmakers to consider whether to leave on a high note, or bleed this motherfucker dry -- and it's safe to say that we all know which direction they took with it, right? Anyway, I can see that I've been writing quite a bit and I've only touched on the first three movies. Fuck, there's still four more Saws to ramble about, though, so I think I'm gonna have to Part 2 this shit by ending it here for now. Or perhaps I should do what the Saw guys didn't do, and quit while I'm ahead. I don't know, man. I don't know much of anything, but I do know that the Double Stacks at Wendy's cost more and taste shittier nowadays. Fuck that shit. You did me wrong, Wendy's, you did me real wrong. I'd go on a diet to spite you if it wasn't for the plain & simple fact that I'd have to put in an effort. Fuck THAT shit.

Click here for my shitty conclusion to my shitty ramblings.

That dog does not want to be anywhere near your crotch, sir. Stop it.

A few weeks ago, friend-to-all-video-stores Phil Blankenship tweeted about a movie called Things, and it sounded pretty awesome in a WTF sort-of-way. A cool-sounding company called Intervision Picture Corp. recently released a special edition DVD (and a limited run of VHS copies), but fortunately for me and unfortunately for them, I was able to put my money back into my awesome wallet when my buddy told me that he already owned the previous DVD release (from the filmmakers' website) and would lend it to me. Later, I took my money back out of my awesome wallet and used it to buy a gram of Skywalker OG which was ultimately some bullshit, so I guess both Intervision and I lost 20 bucks that day.

Things is one of those ultra-low-budget/shot-on-weekends flicks made by some Tim Hortons-eating motherfuckers back in 1989; they shot it on Super 8 film and the only "professional" actor in the entire movie is a porn star named Amber Lynn. She plays this woman who looks like she just came back from some corporate hotshot type's mega-yuppie house, doing blow with said hotshot and another girl, until some bald dude in glasses showed up with a gun and rudely ordered the two girls to vacate the premises.

Now she's standing in front of what looks like the fuckin' Federated Group, or the Home Entertainment section of Crazy Gideon's circa 2004 (which means the products on display are from the early 80's) and either she's pretending to be or actually is an anchorwoman for the local news, only she keeps looking over to her right while reading Tonight's Stories for some reason, like she can see the manager of Crazy Gideon's staring at her and who can blame him -- this chick looks like she'd be more than up for a little Disco Disco Good Good.

I don't know, man, I'm watching her read the cue cards and it's like it never occurred to the filmmakers that maybe those cards should've been placed a little closer to the camera, perhaps even in the same fuckin' room. She has a co-anchor who carries with him the air of Kirk Cameron if he was gay and in Less Than Zero, and it looks like he co-anchors his shit from the Furniture section of Crazy Gideon's, sitting on a couch chair but not the comfy kind, it's the kind you can't recline. These news reports are placed pell-mell throughout the film, and they mostly consist of Amber Lynn telling us about 2 guys who are currently on the run or missing or something, I don't fucking know, don't expect me to pay attention to the goddamn thing.

But the main story involves this dude with a sweet mustache and a sweet-ass John Stamos circa '89 mullet and he's dressed like Garbage Day from Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2, so to me, he's already Lieutenant Awesome in this bitch. He shows up at his brother's house in the woods, with Canadian Ricky Jay as his +1. Nobody's home, though -- or at least that's the impression the movie gives you until suddenly out pops the brother, talking that Hey Keep It Down bullshit, because his wife's in the next room; she's been fallen very ill, ever since she let some quack named Dr. Lucas perform some kind of experiment on her inner plumbing because Blondie here can't shit out a baby.

I'm not too sure it's the wife's fault, though; I mean, look at the fuckin' husband -- he looks like he'd be the kind of guy to shoot blanks, probably due to his balls getting irradiated as a result of too much fucking around old computer parts, because this guy looks like he loves him some fuckin' computers. In the pre-credits opening sequence, he's introduced trying to bang some naked chick with a mask over her face. Already in the first couple of minutes this movie is overwhelmingly Win; the badly dubbed actor sounds like one of Trey Parker's many anonymous side-character voices on South Park, the sad drugged-out porno music is a total beaut with its synthesized cheesiness, and at the end of the scene, you find out that this was all a dream -- meaning that even in this geek's fantasies, the best he can do is score with Butterfaces who need to mask themselves in order to entice the opposite sex.

Anyway, while the poor wife is suffering from intense pain in the bedroom, Perfect Husband, Sweet Mustache, and Canadian Ricky Jay are in the living room drinking beer and pranking each other with Cockroach Sandwiches because it's "Party party party!" according to one of them upon arrival. Look, I'm no fuckin' bon vivant who could put P. Diddy, Kanye West, or any other black music producer to shame when it comes to throwing nauseatingly excessive shindigs, but c'mon, 3 guys and a sick girl ain't a fuckin' party -- at best, it's a disturbing viral video.

And the shit's gonna get even more disturbing because it turns out that Dr. Lucas is one of those EEEEVIL doctors -- a mad doctor. Whenever he's not sticking his finger in some old guy's rectum or keeping up his shitty penmanship by writing referrals and prescriptions, he's busy torture-porning innocent people and it doesn't even seem to be a In The Name Of Science deal with him, I think he just likes to unwind by flaying the flesh off someone's hand or tearing a motherfucker's tongue out. He's the kind of madman who MWAHAHA's while his way-past-any-help victims beg for the sweet release of death.

What's even more freaky is that he does this with the help of a staff; how the fuck did he luck himself into finding like-minded people, did he post an ad on Craigslist? Or is the local job market so bad that these people are willing to ignore all the mutilations and scooped-out eyeballs as long as they're getting health insurance? The movie was shot in Canada but I think it takes place in the States, so I don't think this part of the film is supposed to be a Barbarian Invasions-style indictment on socialized medicine in the Great White North (I bet it won't stop Glenn Beck from using clips from this movie to stir the pot, though). Ah, doesn't matter now -- what matters is that unbeknownst to Sterile Husband and Barren Wife, the doc's created some kind of Thing or Things (kinda hazy on that one) that end up incubating inside the ol' ball & chain before finally pulling an Alien (causing the wife to pull a John Hurt) and now it's fuckin' on.

I take that back, it's not so much "on", as it's just merely "there". Perhaps it's just me, but these guys are reacting rather differently than expected upon discovering that there's a bunch of cat-sized carnivorous monsters prowling the house, having just eaten an innocent woman "to the skull" and looking for more of the same -- or maybe not, because these Things are as lackadaisical as our protagonists. They're not particularly fast or menacing, despite resembling junior Deadly Spawns crossed with a tarantula with a terrible case of Elephantiasis of the nuts -- it's pretty tasty -- but yeah, they walk like someone is holding them off-camera and doing that slightly-bouncy walk that kids would do with their toy soldiers and G.I. Joes when playing War or something. Mostly the Things just chill out and bum around the house; only occasionally, will they attack, and even then, they prefer to use the path of least resistance. These Things are fuckin' slackers, man.

For the most part, the Three Amigos in this flick don't seem too bent out of shape about what's going on, and the main emotional undercurrent between them seems to be one of either Frazzled Annoyance or Drunken Disbelief; the husband doesn't so much mourn the horrific death of his wife, as he just uses it as an excuse for him to start telling his buddies how this all reminds him of some horror novel he read. The plot of the movie seems to be an annoyance to the movie itself, which is far more content spending it's time with the characters acting like tipsy weirdos from the planet of Do The Complete Opposite Of What A Human Being Would Do and speaking in such a rambling, non-sequitur'd manner, that it makes one wonder if Coleman Francis (in Narrator Mode) did a dialogue polish (from beyond the grave) on the screenplay.

But that's cool with me because that's what really makes Things worth watching; you can eliminate the whole Killer Penile Tarantulas On The Loose plot and this movie would still be Top of the Pops for me. These guys, they're putting tape recorders and jackets in freezers and declaring out loud every fuckin' thing they do or see, whether or not there's another living person in the room with them. When they speak, they seem to be in a competition where the actor who can do the most stressing-of-the-wrong-syllable-in-a-word will win a prize -- shit, man, everything they do in general is just so fucking strange. Like, there's one part where Sweet Mustache takes a swig of beer and complains about the flavor, ("Must of came from a well in West Africa"), so he takes the bottle over to the sink and adds "pure American water" to it while humming to himself, then he puts his hand over the bottle and shakes it up before drinking it again.

They devote, like, an entire fuckin' minute of screen time to that kind of bullshit. They also devote long stretches of time to motherfuckers opening cabinets and looking inside for food, motherfuckers looking at artwork on the wall, motherfuckers playing with one of those drinking birds (the same kind from Darkman), leaving me to consider the possibility that the film's title might not be referring to the sharp-fanged monsters at all, but rather, it's serving as a description of the overall plot: just a random series of things happening.

I think a large part of this movie's weirdness stems from the filmmakers fancying themselves as Funny Motherfuckers. See, they're going for an Evil Dead vibe of mixing in the scary with the funny (they also make some of the clumsiest, awkward references to movies EVAAAR in this joint), and while they do succeed in making an overweight asshole crippled by back pain for being an overweight asshole laugh, it's because the humor is so astoundingly unfunny that I couldn't help but crack the fuck up -- it's like the cinematic equivalent to Darrell Bluett. I mean, c'mon -- I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to take it seriously when one character shoves his hand into some leftover blood & guts on a bed, then puts it up to his nose before declaring "Yeah, that's human blood, all right". Whatever, I'm not hating on the motherfuckers, and as long as people are laughing, who gives a shit as to WHY they're laughing. It's better than them booing, that's for fuckin' sure.

Yeah, you can't hate on the fuckin' movie in a Mean Asshole Blogger kind-of-way, at least I can't, even though it's absolutely fucking terrible. See, Things looks/feels like an unfortunate case of some guys who literally just started making movies, meaning we see all the classic fuck-ups one would normally make when one is 14 years old and fucking around with Daddy's Quasar VHS camcorder.

It reminds me of something Robert Rodriguez wrote in that book of his; when he was shooting student films, he noticed how polished his joints were compared to the rest of his class, and that was because most of them waited until they were in film school to pick up a camera. Rodriguez, on the other hand, had been practicing his craft for years with the family video camera & VCR, so by the time he upgraded from VHS to 16mm, homeboy already had a decent grasp on shit like Pacing and Shot Composition -- because nobody starts off making movies like a smooth motherfucker, you gotta fall on your face and eat shit many fuckin' times before you can get your shit together long enough to make an El Mariachi or an Evil Dead.

It's like they wanted to throw in everything but the kitchen sink, until they found out they could only afford a kitchen sink, because the house they were shooting in came with one. They didn't even get the sound right, so they re-recorded everything in post and the shit's in sync, like, half the time, and the sound design itself is very selective because sometimes I guess we in the audience don't need to always hear someone screaming, even though their mouth is open.

Maybe Francis Ford Coppola was in a wine & lithium stupor one night and caught this heartbreaking work of staggering unintentional genius (by way of incompetence), and he got the idea of the No-Screaming scream from them, then used that shit for the end of The Godfather Part III. There's also the music, which sometimes sounds warped, like it was being played on a faulty tape-player. Also, the movie sometimes leaves it up to you to figure out what the fuck a character is looking at/reacting to. And I swear, during one scene I caught a quick glimpse of the clapperboard in-between shots. These are a few of my favorite -- ahem -- things.

The best section of the movie is probably the last 20 minutes or so, because it really begins to ladle on the ridiculousness, particularly with the return of Dr. Lucas. The dubbing also goes completely off the fuckin' rails at this point, like maybe they realized how far gone the movie was and figured they could salvage it by having Super Wacky Fun Time and playing the whole thing off like it was a 70's Kung Fu flick. The actors then go into silent movie theatrics; any opportunity to wildly flail one's arms and make overly expressive faces is taken and ran with all the way to fuckin' Baja. Have you ever seen that short film Paul Thomas Anderson & Adam Sandler made for one of those charity shows where a bunch of celebrities with tax shelters and off-shore accounts show up and guilt trip you with how awesome and caring they are towards their fellow man, all while making you laugh (and think!)? Well, the acting in Things occasionally reminded me of that short.

My initial reaction following Things was similar to this guy's reaction, but after giving myself about a day to recover, I can conclude that yes, it's one of those post-Wood so-bad-they're-good joints, the kind of movie that I wouldn't be surprised to find out has already played at the Cinefamily/Silent Movie Theater to a room full of people hopped up on Pabst Blue Ribbon, giddiness and skinny jeans. This is pure uncut shit, though -- your casual viewer of The Room or Birdemic: Shock and Terror might not be able to handle it, they might come out of it like that kid in that Stephen King short story, The Jaunt.

But if you're the kind of person whose inner child has already been Day of the Locust'd, then you're probably the kind of person who would/should look for this sort of thing. You might enjoy watching it and mocking it/getting owned by it, forgetting for at least 80 minutes that your own cinematic endeavors aren't so far apart from this one. For those 80 minutes, man, you are Somewhere Else and you didn't even have to get high to get there, you're totally sober and yet it still feels like someone put something into your drink -- not for raping purposes, of course not, because who the fuck would want to sexually relate with YOU -- but just to see you make an ass of yourself as you try to make sense of the nonsensical and fail miserably at it. Because you don't so much watch Things as you just let Things happen to you.

In conclusion, I love that the credits were made with the same fonts one can find in your average editing software or public access character generator, but nobody ever uses on account of being some ugly, garish lame-ass shit. Helvetica forever, bitches.

YOU HAVE JUST 

EXPERIENCED 

MY RAMBLINGS ON 

THINGS 

THINGS Moments: Reaction In The Bathroom from Intervision Picture Corp. on Vimeo.

C'mon people, you should know by now that these Marvel movies end with something after the credits, so sit your ass down.

After sitting down in my seat, eagerly awaiting Captain America: The First Avenger, I noticed a family two rows down that included a grandfather-aged man wearing a Captain America t-shirt and a tow-headed grandson-aged boy wearing a similar shirt and carrying what appeared to be a popcorn bowl shaped like Captain America's shield. There was also a family in the row in front of me, only this little bastard had a fuckin' mohawk on his head, so I guess that hairstyle is acceptable with today's youth; I'll bet you the proverbial dollars to the proverbial donuts that Mohawk Boy is a fuckin' asshole to his fellow boy at school. I felt even more certain of this feeling after seeing his father (he of the High & Tight haircut, yet probably never served a goddamn day in the military) put his disgusting and most likely unwashed bare feet up on the seat in front of him, proudly displaying his stupid ankle tattoo -- a bitch tattoo, if you ask me -- while he stretched his legs out and clenched his toes whenever he laughed. He laughed a lot.

Then an entire group of about 10 to 15 very well-behaved Asian children appeared, all wearing blue t-shirts with a school logo on them, all genuinely happy to be there; they were led by a man who was trying to get enough seats for them to sit down. I realized he could get damn near the entire row if I gave up my seat (as well as the seat reserved for my friend Mr. Large Popcorn Bag), so I gave them up and he seemed very appreciative -- and so was I, for that matter, because now it meant that I had an excuse to leave and exchange my ticket for the next showing a half-hour later (where I can probably get a better seat) and I guess I pretty much wasted your time and mine by writing about this.

Soon I was in a smaller theater with a surprisingly childless crowd and I guess Jesus decided to love me a little more that day because a group of tall, athletic and mostly blonde girls in what I'm guessing were college volleyball uniforms showed up and sat in my row, probably because they thought I was harmless and/or gay. That's where it starts and ends by the way, this isn't a fuckin' Penthouse Forum entry, unless you count what I did after the movie once I got home as a result of sitting next to that many short shorts and exposed legs, which in that case would make it The Saddest (And Most Believable) Penthouse Forum Entry Ever.

Anyway, it turned out that there were even more Girls Of Indeterminate Sport, only they were in the auditorium next door watching No Strings Attached 2: Friends With Benefits -- basically it was a split decision over who to swoon over: Chris Evans or that guy from The Social Network who didn't think a million dollars was cool. A billion dollars, on the other hand...

So, the movie, yes, the movie; Captain America: The First Avenger takes place in the early 40's during Dubya Dubya Too and focuses on this five-foot-nothing/hundred-and-nothing proto-Rudy with shit to prove; he's not happy with his fragile frame and litany of medical conditions sparing him from getting his nuts blown off over in another country, he still wants to fight for the Stars & Stripes.

Steve Rogers, he's called, and he's very likable during this part of the movie, probably because of that whole underdog thing he's got going for him. Plus, he will actually go out into the alley and go toe-to-toe with some piece-of-shit who kept talking in a movie theater -- sure, it was less about this asshole talking and more about WHAT he was talking about (talking mad shit over a newsreel about dead soldiers), but still, when you get down to it, Rogers was willing to try to beat this fuck to teach him to shut the fuck up at the cinema.

Anyway, because it's a movie based on a comic book, Rogers becomes the test subject to Stanley Tucci's super-serum that ends up turning him into a super-soldier, allowing Rogers to do super-soldier stuff like hocking war bonds and fake punching Fake Hitler while a bunch of current hot chicks/future old ladies dance around him on the stage. Eventually he gets to own the occasional Kraut in combat and it's interesting that you rarely (if ever) see a swastika or even hear the word "Nazi" that often in this movie, in fact, the bad guys in this movie aren't even the Nazis, but an offshoot group called Hydra.

That was a tad disappointing; I mean, if that's how it is in the comic book, then fine, but I kinda liked the idea of Captain America not so much being The First Avenger as maybe The First Inglourious Basterd -- or at least The First Guantanamo Bay Guard -- but who knows, maybe Hollywood didn't want to risk losing all that potential Neo-Nazi ticket money by pissing off all the skinhead'd, Jew-hating, anti-diversity, White Power-believing asshole audience members who just want to have a good time and watch a superhero kick ass but not at their expense because c'mon, we're all human beings here, we have rights -- but more importantly, we have feelings.

Well, Nazi or not, the main villain is still pretty scary/impressive; Red Skull is his name (actually it's some Kraut name, but who gives a shit) and he's played by Hugo Weaving doing a typically awesome job. The make-up effects are fantastic too, even though I wonder if Red Skull really hates allergy season; I mean, he has no nose (a Saigon whore bit it off, I reckon) but that gaping cavity is still there and that shit can get messy right quick. Whatever, that's his problem, not mine, so fuck that guy.

Red Skull's accent reminded me of Jurgen Prochnow, which then reminded me of how frustratingly disappointed I was with The Keep, which then reminded me of the story I heard about how Michael Mann supposedly screened 3 different cuts of Collateral in 3 separate auditoriums during the premiere and the one that got the best response was the one that was released into theaters the following weekend, and even if that isn't true, it sure as fuck feels true, knowing that wacky talented constantly re-editing bastard. But I digress.

I'm comparing this flick to one of director Joe Johnston's previous films (the one I'm pretty sure got him this job), The Rocketeer. In that one, there was no mistake whatsoever who the bad guys were -- those fuckin' Heil Hitler-ing cocksuckers (in Captain America, they go "Heil Hydra!" and use both arms in their salute, because they are twice as evil and strong, I guess). This was the same movie where a fuckin' bad scary gangster declares out loud that he might be a murdering, thieving, criminal piece-of-shit (I'm paraphrasing here), but he's still an American and next thing you know he's standing side-by-side with a G-man, blasting tommy guns at those Nazi motherfuckers. America Fuck Yeah!

But I guess nowadays it ain't so cool to ride the Proud To Be An American wave, lest you look like some cracker asshole who calls any Middle Easterner a "towelhead" (or "pamperhead", if you're the delightful Sir Larry The Cable Guy, OBE), which is too bad, really. Now we have to be downright Canadian about our American patriotism; in the last Superman movie they tried to be cute as they worked their way around that "Truth, justice, and the American way" line because God Forbid, right?

As for this flick, they try to slightly de-Fuck Yeah the proceedings and make it a tad more palatable to the America-haters by doing things like making the creator of the super-serum a German dude who is sooo not down with the Third Reich, and by having the hot chick in this movie a Brit; there's a scene where one recruit gives the Brit chick some shit for being from another country, and her response is to deck the motherfucker -- this is basically the filmmakers telling any dissenters in the audience to shut their goddamn mouths and just enjoy the movie.

I said "slightly de-Fuck Yeah the proceedings", though, because the filmmakers still manage to fill the movie with plenty of American flags while being sneakily P.C. about it all, and I'm sure the Pacifica Radio crowd will still find plenty to bitch about. Anyway, Cap doesn't go it alone on these missions, he has a team of colorful characters to assist him and they're basically a rainbow coalition of badasses; you have this Asian guy who seems pretty well-adjusted for someone who probably has a family currently interned in some camp while he fights for the country that put them there, you have the token Black guy who is thrilled to be able to drink in mixed company but has no idea that the brothas back home are being guinea pig'd with syphilis by Uncle Sam, you have a French guy (of course, he doesn't speak English) who in a few years will get the memo from his fellow Frenchies that he's supposed to hate Americans, and then you have a couple of White guys who are loving life because it's the mid-20th century and they're a couple of White guys. By casting these various types, the filmmakers show us the real America -- diverse yet united in a love for this country and a hatred of all Nazis and wetbacks (there's no raza in this flick).

The chick in this movie, she's fit, yo; apparently many a fellow Interneter agrees with me because the name Hayley Atwell has been among the top searches on Yahoo and most likely The Google. I liked the relationship between her and Steve Rogers, because I found it very truthful to Real Life; see, she knew him when he was the skinny/scrawny Steve Rogers, and during that time, she was nice to him and you can tell she liked his personality but it's not until he goes from Boy to Man and shows up all pumped up that he not only becomes Captain America but The Captain Of Her Heart as well. Hell, the first time she sees him, she can't even restrain herself from wanting to touch his buff chest. It made me wonder what would happen if halfway through the movie Rogers lost his powers and became Clark Kent again -- you know what would happen, she'd be off of his jock and on to another guy, like Tony Stark's fondue-loving father with the pedo-stache (back then, those were just regular mustaches).

It's not The Greatest Comic Book Movie Ever Made, but then again in retrospect, neither were most of the comic book movies of the past 10 years (didn't stop the critics from saying that shit though); it's a solid flick, with good action and drama -- ultimately a fine way to spend an afternoon and get some air-conditioning without feeling guilty about it afterwards. But apparently it didn't make that great of an impression on me because I can't think of anything else to say about it. Let's see, I talked about Red Skull, Chris Evans, Brit McHottie, Joe Johnston -- oh, OK, I know what to say now.

I think Joe Johnston was the perfect choice for this movie, because in addition to the indisputable fact that he directed the indisputably awesome The Muthafuckin' Rocketeer, he's also great with giving his best flicks an infectious Gee Whiz vibe to them. I mean, shit man, in the Sincerity department, Steven Spielberg almost comes off like a cynical hipster compared to Johnston when he's unleashed without his meds (which is very rare, unfortunately). Even that fuckin' digital Panavision Genesis cinematography can't tarnish the fuckin' nostalgic glow that emanates from this flick; like The Rocketeer Fuck Yeah, this movie looks and feels less like a recreation of the past and more like a fondly remembered fever dream of an idea of the past.

But is it as good as Rocketeer Comin', Yo? Well, no -- but what the fuck is? It's still pretty good, though, and would make a cool double-bill with it -- hell, let's make it a triple-feature and add Zone Troopers to that movie night. Have you seen Zone Troopers? No? Oh, come on, man, it's on Netflix Instant, you should see it. You should also see Trancers, because it's got most of the same cast and crew -- including the writers, who went on to write a movie by the name of....yup, you fuckin' guessed it: The Rocketeer Like A Muthafucka. Sorry about the mess I just made in your room from blowing your fuckin' mind right now with that. Holy shit, did that sound wrong.

In conclusion, Tommy Lee Jones is looking really old and grizzled nowadays, even for Tommy Lee Jones.

It ain't no Dark of the Sun, that's for muthafuckin' sure

Let me just say right now that I considered myself a Michael Bay fan, with the exception of Pearl Harbor (because really, who likes that shit, aside from the Japanese?), otherwise I considered the man a genuine Artist, in the same way Roy Lichtenstein was an artist. But it's just that somewhere during Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, I started to wonder if all of these film critics had a point about his movies, or maybe I was simply growing out of them. Whatever the case, I decided that I would break my Watching Michael Bay Movies At A Movie Theater streak and I wouldn't go to see the third Transformers, because like my man Dubya says, "Fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me, I can't get fooled again."

Ah, but these goddamn people who aren't me, they went to see the fuckin' thing -- mostly because it's their jobs as film critics to see it -- and they horrified me by going on and on about the apparently awe-inspiring God Gave Me The Vision And I Can Walk Again final action-packed hour of this film, and how you'd have to be an absolute piece-of-shit jackass cocksucker douchebag who hates fun to not want to see this movie in 3D. You motherfuckers!

So what better day to watch an empty display of lights and smoke in the name of Entertainment than on the 4th of July; before spending the rest of the evening with the family, I would watch Transformers: Dark of the Moon at my local theater. That's an odd-sounding title, by the way. It's missing the word "Side", that's the problem. So rather than sounding cool and bringing up memories of that Pink Floyd album, the title gives you the impression that the person who wrote it was in a real hurry and accidentally skipped a word. Whatever. This is Hollywood, where you don't have to number all of your sequels and if you do, they don't even have to match in numerical format, like Death Wish II, Death Wish 3, Death Wish 4, Death Wish V. 

I didn't care -- nor did I intend to care -- if my fellow moviegoers acted like asses throughout the merciless 147-minute running time (counting trailers), because this joint (as well as every other Michael Bay joint) comes with Scotchgard protection against any type of Asshole Damage, because a Michael Bay joint is already fully asshole'd up as it is. So you can use your iPhone to post Twitter statuses on the movie ("Wow. Transformers 3 is AWSUM!!1"), you can text, you can talk, you can bring your colicky baby, and it would all be a futile redundancy because you can't asshole this movie out -- Bay's edits between shots make more noise and visual disturbance than anything you can dish out with your amateur ass, so don't even try. They didn't try, though. In fact, this was the most well-behaved audience I've watched a movie with in years. For a fuckin' Michael Bay movie.

Finding myself without an edible, I ended up smoking a few bowls in the parking lot and showed up absolutely fuckin' baked for this movie; see, in addition to reading about how great the last hour of the film is, I also read that there was still about 80-90 minutes of the usual Baytastic Komedy and "drama" that one has to sit through in order to get to it. I wanted to make that part of the movie relatively painless for me, so I made sure to arrive feeling no pain. A healthy amount of elevated paranoia crept in while I was at the concession stand, and I felt that EVERYONE around me knew I was fucked up (hence their smiles) and in my attempt to make it as quick and simple a transaction as possible, I probably made things worse. But at least I made it, stumbling into the auditorium with my arms wrapped around a large buttered popcorn and refillable cup of Cherry Coke, plopping down dead center in my seat, and finding the on-screen advertisements for Sprint and Coca-Cola and the local baby doctor establishment entertaining for the first time ever.

Hey, by the way -- I'm probably gonna spoil some shit here, in case you believe that a movie like this can be spoiled. I mean, people are seeing this movie despite the reviews pretty much telling them DON'T GO. So, even if I spoil something here, you're still gonna see it. So there. 

You know how most of us bitched about Wolverine not using his fuckin' claws or whatever those razor-things were in X-Men, and then I guess Bryan Singer heard the fans out because in X2 he started stabbing and slashing the shit out of everyone and the whole audience was all like FUCK YEAH, NOW THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKIN' ABOUT MUTHAFUCKA? Well, I think Bay misunderstood the universal Booooo given to his last Transformers movie as a critique that his robots weren't Hard enough, so in this one, he makes Optimus Prime some kind of violent emo -- the Weston Cage of sentient alien robots, if you will -- in an attempt to give the audience someone to swoon over how badass he is, but he's not. I mean, Optimus Prime has a fuckin bitch-fit in this movie that ends with him transforming into a truck and not talking to anyone for a while. That's right, he turns into a 14-year-old boy who goes to his room and slams the door because his mom cut off World of Warcraft, but thankfully, Bay spares us the sight of Optimus shoving a remote control up his mecha-anus as an act of helpless rage.

Whenever Shia LeBeouf isn't spending his time in interviews making everyone else who isn't him look like an asshole, he's making fat worthless bloggers like me look like douchebags for defending him; in my Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps ramblings, I talked about how I thought he had a likable presence in movies or something like that, I'm not looking it up. I also remember him being relatively likable in the last two Transformers, yet here it appears that he's not so much playing Sam Witwicky as he's playing Shia LeBeouf; simultaneously callow, arrogant, whiny, prone to violent anger, quick to insult, and last but not least, a "fucking idiot" (to quote Mr. Harrison Ford). This is the hero of the film.

At first, I can understand why he's a bit upset; after kinda/sorta/not really saving the world twice, he got the medal and handshake by President Obama, which sounds awesome except he's also a recent Ivy League college graduate, and like most college grads from awesome schools, he can't find a job to save his fuckin' life; we're treated to a "funny" montage of him going on various job interviews and it's done to Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion", a song that was once associated as the opening track to Richard Linklater's muthafuckin' masterpiece, Dazed and Confused. But Bay, he ain't having that shit, so not only did he use it in a "funny" montage during Armageddon, he now uses it again here in this flick. Either Bay's paying tribute to his own awesomeness, or he just wants to make it clear that Sweet Emotion is his and only his; I OWN YOU, SWEET EMOTION, I OWN YOU! YOUR KARATE IS A JOKE! YOUR KARATE IS SHIT!

Witwicky also feels threatened in the manhood department because his employed girlfriend has been supporting him, which I think is pretty fuckin' sweet if you can swing that. What's wrong with having the lady in your life be the primary/only breadwinner? I'm speaking for myself, of course. I mean, I have a small dick so there's not much manhood here you can threaten anyway, and as such, I'm not hung up on that kinda thing, the I'm A Man thing; I'd love to have a sugar mama, as long as she's cool with it (as well as my forced-by-my-anatomy "motion in the ocean" style of lovemaking) and doesn't bring that shit up during arguments (when all of a sudden my not having a job becomes a convenient issue/ammunition).

But soon, it becomes very clear that he's more than just upset by the cards dealt to him by that asshole called Life, he's obviously picked up a trendy coke problem between sequels (probably at one of those college parties) and he's now living life as a puffed-up, sniffly little bag of nerve endings. By the way, on a completely unrelated note, I think Michael Bay would be the perfect director for a movie based on Charlie Sheen's life -- a movie approved by Mr. Tiger Blood himself, or course.

Anyway, Witwicky needs a good ass-kicking to set him straight, but Bay isn't interested in giving him one because Bay probably sees a lot of himself in Witwicky, which is funny because the idea of a character like Sam Witwicky probably came from executive producer/Bay's new father surrogate Steven Spielberg, who probably demanded that the young nerdy kids in the audience have someone they can look up to, and by "young nerdy kids", he means Steven Spielberg. But somewhere during the filmmaking process, Bay looked down on Witwicky, probably found him "faggy" and demanded his slave screenwriters to make him cooler, which in the case of this movie, means DOOOOUUUUUCHE BAGGGGGAAAAAAA. 

You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who would find the silver lining in the dark cloud coming from the local death camp's crematorium, but that's because you've never met Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who has about six million souls to thank for her being cast as Witwicky's Employed Girlfriend. She's attractive, but Megan Fox was more my speed (I like how Bay got the last word by having the robots in this movie refer to her character as being "mean"), and she's not as good as Fox was in the last couple films, which is pretty fucked up since Fox wasn't exactly Oscar-caliber in her performance, either. Speaking of Oscars, Oscar-winning actress Frances McDormand is in this movie because big paychecks kick ass and while her performance isn't Oscar-caliber either, she's still fun to watch because even though her character is supposed to be this hardass Head Lady In Charge, watching her ordering people around only succeeded in making me go a little bit Awww (obviously displaying some leftover residual Adorableness from her Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day co-star, The Adorable Amy Adams); her scenes look/feel like something Albert Brooks and Bruno Kirby would be editing.

Come to think of it, the most interesting characters are played by actors who've appeared in Coen Brothers films; in addition to John Turturro reprising his role as Some Dude Who Constantly Makes An Ass Of Himself, John Malkovich is here as well and I really hope those miniature white piano keys in his mouth are strictly for his character, rather than Malkovich trying to pass off overly-fake dental work as The Real Deal. He plays Witwicky's new boss (yeah, Sam eventually gets a job) and I guess he's funny, not that I or anyone else in the half-full theater laughed at the guy, but this movie got an "A" Cinemascore grade from audiences, so obviously someone's laughing out there. He does have one scene I genuinely liked, though; he makes a deal with Witwicky that would enable him to see an Autobot up close. He ends up completely geeking out upon meeting Bumblebee, and for the next minute or so, we're treated to this powerful guy reduced to acting like a little not-all-there kid; I swear he even ends up on the ground with all fours up, like a dog expecting a belly rub. It's just so fuckin' weird, man.

In fact, a lot of this fuckin' movie is fuckin' weird. It's possibly Bay's strangest movie yet, or maybe all of Bay's movies are this WTF if you simply added a lot of THC into the viewing experience. In one scene, a character in an office building is thrown to his death by Laserbeak (he hisses to his intended target that he's going to "suicide" him; perhaps another example of Baying tribute to a previous movie -- in this case, using a line Connery used in The Rock) and the sequence starts off kinda scary, then tries to be hilarious, then further embarrasses itself by dipping its toe into Hudsucker Proxy waters in the varying ways the employees react to this man's death; Bay must be a HUGE Coen Brothers fan, considering the actors and situations he's biting from them. He must especially be a fan of their early work, back when Barry Sonnenfeld was their cinematographer and used to move that camera all crazy, like if that shit was Chev Fuckin' Chelios.

Ken Jeong used to be a doctor; he made a good living treating the sick and helping them feel better and generally being a great representative of not only his people, but of human beings in general. But he wasn't happy with that; what he really wanted to do with his life is play the Wacky Oriental in movies and making all the non-Asians in the audience go HAW HAW HAW, AIN'T DAT CHINK FUNNEH?! while the Asians in the audience look away in embarrassment and that's why he's now the go-to Komedic Chinaman in the cinematic arts. OK, I'm being unfair, that's not at all the case with him, I take it back, he's pretty awesome in Community and as long as he's making bank, who am I to talk this cowardly shit behind closed cyberdoors? I'm an anonymous coward, that's who I am. Anyway, in this movie he plays some guy who knows about what the Decepticons are up to and it all ends with him buttfucking Shia LeBeouf in the men's bathroom. If it was the women's bathroom, I'd object, but it's not, so pump away, my man.

I have to be honest with you and tell you that I'm not totally sure what this movie was about; my interest was only in the reportedly mind-fuckingly Baytastic final hour. There was a lot of talking between the characters and it all sounded like Charlie Brown's teacher to me, and whenever the Autobots and the Decepticons spoke, it just sounded like a bunch of metallic rumbling and unfunny circa-1960's ethnic voices. I did not decipher what anyone was saying, nor did I care to know -- with the exception of the character of Sentinel Prime; I remember most of his dialogue because Leonard Nimoy did the voicework, which meant that I was watching a giant sentient robot speaking with an old man denture voice.

Otherwise, all I knew during the first half was that the 1969 moon landing was really a cover-up so Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin can look for a crashed spaceship; later on, the real Buzz Aldrin shows up in the movie so Optimus Prime can get all gooey over him, even though I suspect Optimus was being disingenuous, because Optimus Prime is an asshole who doesn't give a shit about humans in general, let alone one who walked on the moon. It's an interesting scene, but when it comes to recent narrative scenes involving Buzz Aldrin talking to a fictional character, let's just say Optimus Prime is no Liz Lemon. I mean, Liz Lemon is capable of some evil shit, but I like to think that overall she's a good person with an average amount of flaws, like most of us, whereas Optimus is really just a piece of metallic shit. Robot ain't got no humanity!

See, Optimus is the leader of the Autobots, and they -- like everyone else in this movie -- are completely unlikable assholes and their ultimate plan is just as assholish with a touch of Borderline Evil. What happens is that the U.N. eventually tells the Autobots to get the fuck out of Earth because it's the only way to avoid a war with the slightly-more-assholish Decepticons, and the Autobots are like "Yeah, sure, OK", getting on a space shuttle and blasting off to who knows where. Well, sure enough, the Decepticons blow the shuttle up (there's a really cool shot where a shocked Witwicky watches this from a distance) and Boo-Hoo, the Autobots are dead and now the Decepticons are in Chicago, vaporizing thousands of innocent people and destroying many families and expensive property in the process, but I'm not crying because these are the same assholes who refuse to stock ketchup at their hot dog stands (not that I like ketchup on my hot dog, but I believe in having the freedom to choose to fuck up my hot dog with that bullshit if I want to).

It's some pretty cold/scary shit; all these people running for their lives, but it's all for naught because the Decepticons eventually catch up with them and murder them all, leaving behind a destroyed and empty city with only skulls, charred clothing, and ashes left behind as a sad reminder that human beings once populated this great metropolis. So in a way, I guess Megan Fox was right about Michael Bay being like Hitler. 

Except, it turns out that the Autobots are still alive! They faked that shit so the humans can understand how much the Autobots are needed. Now I want you to think about that for a second; the Autobots faked their death and chilled out for about 24 hours while thousands of innocent people were being murdered, that way we can be all appreciative about these assholes when they come back. Lady and gentleman, I wanted to applaud Michael Bay and screenwriter Ehren Kruger for not only serving us that cold-blooded plate of heroics, but for insisting that we would happily accept that bullshit and ask for seconds. The only other asshole that I know of who would pull some shit like that -- kill an astonishing number of motherfuckers just to make sure that the rest respect you, fear you, and depend on you -- is that one guy, what's his name? Oh yeah, GOD.

This finally culminates in an hour-long throwdown between the humans, Autobots, Decepticons, Michael Bay, and the audience; shit gets blown up and tossed around in Chi-town, probably pissing off that fuckin' Leonard Maltin-looking motherfucker John Landis in the process, because until now, that guy was the master in fuckin' up Chicago proper. Bay found a pretty cool loophole in having graphic violence in a PG-13 movie too; the robots own each other by ripping off heads, arms, legs, and as a result we see red-colored liquid spew out that's obviously supposed to be something that isn't blood, like oil or whatever the fuck these alien robots run on, but it looks enough like blood to satisfy the audience's lust for it. OK, my lust for it. At least it looked like blood -- could be the fucked-up loss of brightness due to the 3D glasses. I paid extra for that shit.

The action was decent for the most part, it really didn't make that big of an impression with the exception of one awesome setpiece involving a building; for whatever reason, a group of the good guys run up to one of the top floors of this office building, and eventually the Decepticons show up and start trying to timber that shit down. That was pretty fuckin' insane, and it's also very telling that the majority of it showcased the humans, rather than the robots. I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that even after 3 movies, I can't tell where a fuckin' Transformers face is; every time one of them decides to speak, it takes me a couple of seconds to make out where the mouth is. Same goes for the action scenes; more often than not, when these dudes throw down, it looks like someone is splattering fruitcake all over the frame, and I can't get excited over fruitcake filling the screen, I just can't. I'm sorry, I can't. I don't even like fruitcake, stop it.

What else can I say about this movie? Oh, I liked the more-than-usual amount of ADR work used in this movie, for all the scenes and shots the filmmakers thought the audience would be too stupid to understand unless they had someone practically narrate the meaning behind them. My fave would be when Witwicky and The Chick Jason Statham's Banging are getting all I Love You with each other and Bumblebee shoots out a few circular sprockets and gears onto the ground. He then plays a wedding march through his speakers. But because we're all so fucking stupid, the close-up shot of the metallic rings is accompanied by the girlfriend's off-screen voice exclaming "Rings!" Ah, thank you very much for clearing that up, lady.

I was entertained, more so than with the last two movies, but I think being stoned for the first two hours had more than a little something to do with it. I can see sneaking in and watching the last hour again, but that's about it as far as repeat viewings go. If you're gonna see it, then yes, try to find the biggest screen you can find to check it out. Get drunk or stoned, if you can. The 3D is pretty cool, but not necessary. Yeah, that's right, I said that shit. Anyway, it took him 3 tries, but I'd like to congratulate Michael Bay on finally making a half-decent Transformers movie. Way to be on top of your game there, chief.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child (in Fuck Me Shoes)

For the first (and last) time, I decided to take notes while watching a movie, because I'm sure I read that Cathie Horlick would do that for her blog and I know Roger Ebert does that shit for his reviews; I believe Cat jots her notes down in a notepad while Ebert scrawls his fuckin' thoughts on composition-sized paper and then just drops it to the floor beside him, where I assume his servants pick them up and place them in a velvet-lined basket for later. Since I ripped off my Movie Tally format from Ms. Horlick, I might as well take her note-taking style as well, so I went with the notepad.

Well, I won't do that again because it's too distracting for an easily distracted motherfucker like me; plus, my left-handed chicken scratches are even worse when being written in the dark PLUS I was stoned while watching the film, so that shit was even harder to make out the following day and damn near impossible the day after that when I decided to give it another try (now that I was more clear-headed). One of the few notes I was able to make out read "PARADIGM ALIENS" and I have absolutely no fucking clue as to what I meant. I would've made a shitty detective or a great doctor with my terrible note-taking abilities and Quentin Tarantino-style depths of penmanship.

This is one of those movies that I'm rapidly forgetting about with each passing hour, which sucks because it's been about 3 days already since I've seen Sucker Punch, which I rented from my favorite video store/head shop. Zack Snyder directed this one (he co-wrote it too) and I've always been cool with this guy; lots of people seem to be throwing him in with the Michael Bays of the cinematic world and I don't think that's right. Sure, he's a flashy motherfucker but I also think he's more restrained than Bay; people hate on that trick he does where he slow-mos a shot and then towards the end he cranks it back to regular motion, but they seem to be forgetting that by doing that, he's not cutting to 17 different camera angles fast enough for your brain to barely register the image, but people always gotta bitch about something.

I didn't see this in the movie theater because I read an interview with Snyder where he talked about how he shot this movie with the intention of getting a PG-13 rating, so he shot it with no gore and no foul language. But the MPAA still gave it an R-rating, so he had to cut shit out anyway -- meaning a total of 18 minutes of footage ended up on the cutting room floor. By the way, isn't "cutting room floor" an outdated saying nowadays? I mean, that used to refer to the days of cutting movies on film and using actual trim bins and hanging film strips up like they were freshly washed socks or something. So unless you're Steven Spielberg or Christopher Nolan, you're probably cutting your shit on Avid or Final Cut Pro and deleted scenes are hitting the cutting room hard drive, not the fucking floor.

Anyway, Snyder did us a solid by saying that his cut of the movie would be released on Blu-ray, which was cool of him because it was like he was telling us "Hey guys, don't waste your money on a watered-down version, wait a few months and get the Blu-ray!" Shit, maybe that's why Sucker Punch didn't do well in theaters -- everyone decided to wait to see the full version at home. Shoulda worded that one differently there, Snyder.

So I rented the Extended Cut Blu-ray (the word "extended" must mean that Snyder approved both cuts of the movie, hence no "director's cut" -- either that or he's gonna Ultimate Watchmen our asses come Christmastime with an even longer version) and the clerk behind the counter (he appeared to be in his late teens, lucky son-of-a-bitch bastard I'll kill ya) smiled and told me that this movie was "the best softcore movie ever".

I told him what I just told you about the Extended Cut and he looked confused; turns out that he only saw the PG-13 cut in the theaters, which made me wonder if this guy had even seen or heard of Cinemax. Really, video store clerk? Softcore? Whatever, little boy; in my day, softcore featured Shannon Tweed or Shannon Whirry or any other fuckin' Shannon. Softcore in my day did not feature actresses from Into the Wild, they featured ladies so smokin' hot like Athena Massey that you felt bad they weren't gonna get more famous but at the same time you were grateful because their lack of success meant they wouldn't pull some "I'm an actress now!" legit shit and you would continue to see them in even more softcore joints because America is the greatest country EVER.

OK, so the movie starts out with this pretty cool intro (done to a cover of the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams") that felt like 10 minutes but was probably only 2, but you know how it is when you smoke that devil weed, that shit makes you think you just activated Jack Deth's Long Second Watch (which would make a pretty cool name for a strain, now that I think of it; I'll take an eighth of Sour Diesel and an ounce of Jack Deth's Long Second Watch). The opening gets you up to speed with a Her Life So Far montage as it approaches the main character's present situation, getting to a point that I felt like I was watching a hot chick version of Up only not nearly as depressing (in the way that only Real Life can be that fucking depressing).

Anyway, this main chick and her little chick sister are being hurled into a world of shit; their rich (and I'm assuming much-loved) mom is dead and their step-dad is hating on them because the lion's share of the inheritance is going to them. Eventually, Big Sister has had enough of Asshole Stepfather's bullshit and pops a cap into him, wounding the asshole but accidentally killing Little Sister in the process which is sooo not the results she was looking for.

As a result of this fuck-up, our main girl (now known as Baby Doll) gets thrown into a nuthouse (where Asshole Stepfather pays off an orderly to drug her up until the lobotomist arrives to fix her permanently) and suddenly she's imagining herself in some kind of slut orphanage crossed with some Suspiria dancing-school shit (it's a brothel, but they don't seem to do much brothel-ing -- ha ha, Snyder, so much for your attempted PG-13) because that's what you have to do, you have to escape the troubles of the real world by escaping to the safe confines of your imagination (I didn't see a single book in that asylum, so it's not like she could just hop a ride on the muthafuckin' Reading Rainbow and escape to a world of imagination THAT way).

Yeah man, she starts having fantasies about being in some brothel/cabaret/Suspiria school and hooking up with 4 other chicks and before you go OH YEEEEAAAHHH, calm down because no, they don't dyke out, they don't even hint at the possibility of that. Instead, they're bonding on a Girl Power vibe rather than a Box Lunch At The Y vibe, which I hope makes the straight girls happy because it sure as shit ain't pleasing me and my lesbian sisters, that's for fuckin' sure.

Actually, the lack of Brown Chicken Brown Cow doesn't bother me, the film offers a fetching enough scenario on its own and it's fun enough for me to look at these girls all huddled up and Baby Doll my mind into a NC-17 version of this movie. It's an awesome movie, the one playing in my head and besides, even if I didn't have the power of imagination, I do have the power of the Internet and if that's what I really want to see, then I can see it. This is also why Tits In Cinema is pretty much dead. Goddamn internet -- invented for stable communication following a nuclear war, but resulting in vaporizing the hopes of many a lonely moviegoer. Anyway, I haven't seen the theatrical cut, but I'm really surprised that this version was going to get an R-rating, because this is truly one of the lightest R-rated movies I've seen.

I only remember 3 shots of blood in the entire movie and it wasn't some kind of Kill Bill arterial spray-fest either; I watched some of that Charles Bronson movie Assassination after Sucker Punch and I thought that was a bloodier movie -- and that shit was rated PG-13! I saw one motherfucker get his chest all squibbed out after Chuckie B blasted him with a machine gun, then later on, some asshole in a wet suit got his all over the face, and the movie still managed to get a PG-13. But then again, that was 1987 and this is now. Plus, I don't remember seeing Bronson stroke a dying dragon's neck like it was a throbbing cock while Jill Ireland sticks her hands in the dragon's vaginal-looking slit throat and pulls out a glowing pair of balls, but I sure as fuck saw the girls of Sucker Punch do that Work The Shaft/Cradle The Balls shit, so maybe I can see why the MPAA was harder on Snyder than they were on Peter R. Hunt.

You're probably now thinking "How the fuck do dragons and their glowing balls figure into this movie?", and if you quiet down I'll tell you. See, it's not enough for Baby Doll to pretend she's in a fantasy world of even more fucked-up shit to escape the already fucked-up shit in her real life, she also escapes into a fantasy world within the fantasy world, where she looks like the Dream Girl for the kind of guy who swears he watches Sailor Moon because the stories are well-written and the animation is great -- an underage-looking chick in a schoolgirl uniform, wielding both a samurai sword and a semi-automatic handgun.

Call it female empowerment or call it exploitation of women, but most of this movie consists of hot chicks killing the shit out of everything while wearing the fuck out of sexy fetish wear. Scott Glenn is in this movie, and that freshly-squeezed orange juice-demanding motherfucker must've been very happy on the set of Sucker Punch, because that meant that whenever he wasn't playing this dreamworld guru (the Wise Man, he's called), he got to hang out and do his best not to be too obvious when ogling these young hot chicks with their high heeled boots & giant machine guns, all the while these girls were probably all Scott's such a good listener! when in fact he was probably just too busy checking them out while pretending to listen to their life stories because really girls, we just don't care.

Don't take that the wrong way, girls, because I love ya. In fact, watching this movie brought up my said-before thought about how movies would be better if the casts consisted of only women. Eventually the movie works itself into being one of those prison-break joints, and it even has one of those scenes where the girls are gathered in secret and discussing who's gonna do what part of the job and how are they gonna do said part. I love that shit, and I love it even more when it's a group of attractive women involved, rather than some fuckin' guys. I don't know how you straight girls and gay guys can do it; as a man, I can safely declare that men are just about the most disgusting creatures on the planet (next to the monkey), and because of that, I feel bad for those who are cursed with this innate attraction towards us (well, not counting Me, of course).

The villains in this movie are effectively Boo Hiss and sure enough, they're Men; there's really only about 2 of them, the stepfather and the evil piece-of-shit orderly of indeterminate (but very likely to be a dirty Hispanic) origin. The orderly (like the rest of the asylum's staff and patients) also shows up in a dual role in the dreamworld; in his case, he's the evil piece-of-shit brothel boss/mobster of indeterminate (but very likely to be a dirty Hispanic) origin; he's very effective because in addition to being Mean and Cruel, he also genuinely believes himself to be the good guy in the movie of his life. He's not a mustache-twirler (his mustache is too small, anyway), he doesn't necessarily enjoy being a scumbag, but he genuinely feels he's being wronged by the people around him -- which I guess justifies his horrible treatment of them. What a fucking asshole.

Laugh all you want, but I'm gonna say that this is Snyder's most personal film; first of all, he co-wrote the fuckin' thing and second, it's obvious this was all shit he grew up thinking of and dreaming of and maybe even occasionally jerking off to. It's like Snyder, after the success of 300 and the kinda-success of Watchmen, was summoned to a meeting with the Warner Brothers (and the Warner sister, Dot) and was told that they had $80 million burning a hole in their pockets and if he had an idea for a movie, any movie, they would give it to him. I bet you Snyder sweated it out in that office, because based on his past works (all adaptations of existing material) the motherfucker ain't exactly a fountain of original ideas, but he is a fountain of great ways to visualize that shit.

He had only half-a-second to come up with something -- anything! -- and the first words that came out of his mouth was "Sucker Punch". The brothers Warner (and sister Dot) were intrigued, and because everything is bass ackwards in Hollywood, rather than have him elaborate right then and there, they scheduled another meeting. So Snyder, he probably raced it over to his attic and pored over his old high-school notebooks and sketchpads and took that to the meeting. He showed them all of these crazy doodles and sketches he drew in high-school (instead of paying attention to his English Literature teacher's lectures) and passed it off as storyboards for this movie, along with some notes he scribbled during the drive to the studio.

The suits looked it over -- German zombie soldiers, orcs, dragons, exploding zeppelins, a badass squad of All-Girl killers, musical sequences, Carla Gugino looking very angular, green-screens, CGI, practical action, fuckin' killer robots with fuckin' pink bunnies drawn on them, etc -- and their reaction was "Hot damn! We still don't know what the fuck it's about, but my man, you got yourself an $80 million budget!" and that's how we now have Sucker Punch.

This is the kind of movie that will probably live on in midnight showings, and as the years pass it'll get overpraised as being some kind of underrated classic, like Tron (sorry Tron fans). If you mean classic in terms of snazzy visual sequences, then yeah. But if you mean classic in terms of something like, oh, I don't know, I'm just pulling this one out of my ass -- Brazil, maybe -- then no. To put it in Gene Kelly musical terms, Sucker Punch is no Singin' in the Rain but it certainly is It's Always Fair Weather. In other words, it's a decent story with great setpieces. I'm not a girl (despite what my ex-girlfriends say), so I'm not even going to pretend to know if this shit is empowering to females (as Snyder claims), but I am a man, and as a man I can say with confidence that I did get a bit of a semi while watching.

Like I said, I've been cool with Snyder's joints but I haven't seen one that rocked my world yet. This one comes closest and Snyder's only real crime here seems to be that he's not a great filmmaker because his screenwriting muscles are not nearly as buff as his visual storytelling muscles. Whatever, man -- the guy did the best he could to the strengths of his abilities and the result is an overall entertaining movie, warts and all. The girls are attractive, the music is cool, the action is pretty sweet and even some of the mise-en-scene makes you feel like you're watching the cover art for a shitty metal band come to life -- that's a positive, by the way.

I haven't seen the theatrical version, but I did read about some of the stuff that shows up in this R-rated cut that didn't show up in the PG-13 version, and based on that I would say if you're gonna see Sucker Punch, by all means see the extended R-rated cut, otherwise you are missing out on some shit that probably made the PG-13 version damn near incoherent as a result of being snipped out because a group of prudes working for an outdated system didn't like what they saw.

In conclusion, this movie is a 14-year-old Asian boy's wet dream. What, too offensive? Fine, then.

In conclusion, this movie is a 14-year-old Mexican boy's wet dream.

Are you happy now? Jesus fuckin' Christ, people.

J.J. Abrams' ideal woman has a great personality, a pretty smile, big tits and lens flares all over her.

The sucky thing about being self-employed is the whole lack-of-medical-insurance thing, but a cool thing about being self-employed is that you sometimes find yourself able to attend a showing of Super 8 at your local theater at 9 on a Monday morning. I previously declared that I would attend movie theaters far less since The War of the Considerate vs. the Inconsiderate ended in a victory for the latter, leaving me roaming the barren lands like Ethan Edwards, looking all assed out as the doors to the movie theater close behind me, separating me from all those happy people talking and texting their asses off, content in raising discontent in their fellow moviegoers. But hey, give me an early morning option with fewer people and fewer possibilities of Cocksucker or Cuntbag busting out with his or her iPhone and I'll give you a happy moviegoer. 

The night before going to see Super 8, I got a text from one of my preciously few friends and she told me that she had just finished watching said film, and that there was a character in it that reminded her of me. Oh fuck, like I really needed that; now I was cursed to watch the movie with the thought in the back of my mind of "Is that supposed to be how she sees me?" while trying to enjoy it. Turns out she was talking about the character of Charles the kid director, because that was pretty much me growing up; making movies and being a fat fuck. 

So yeah, it's summer 1979 and Charles is trying to make a zombie movie with his friends, and Super 8 focuses on one kid in particular named Joe Lamb who's had a shitty four months so far, what with his mother being crushed to death by a fuckin' steel girder. But whatever, you can't waste your life crying over the dead, so Joe's pretty well-adjusted and not nearly as fucked up as you'd think; he's painting train models and living life with his father, who's deputy sheriff of a small fictional Ohio utopia filled with clean wonderful White people (father's interests include pizza, baseball, and crying on the toilet while reminiscing about dead wives). 

Because Charles reminded my friend of me, I'm gonna say that he's an awesome motherfucker who knows what the fuck is up. He's very bossy and take-charge because that's how young winners and future big-ballers roll, ain't that right, Charles? Not only does this guy have no problem walking up to a cute girl in his class and asking if she wants to be in the movie, he also somehow manages to get her to jack her father's ride and drive them to the location -- that's straight-up pimp, talking that smooth shit! 

The only thing not that awesome about Charles is that he keeps calling things "mint", which I'd like to think was the summer '79 version of "awesome" but is most likely just writer-director J.J. Abrams' trying to make Fetch happen. I'd have to ask Billy Corgan or anyone else who grew up during that time, ask if people threw "mint" around, like "Hey, I just saw Apocalypse Now. That movie was so mint!" I was going to use another '79 movie like Moonraker as my example, but I didn't think that movie was mint at all. 

Anyway, if that's the case, if "mint" is just Abrams trying to create slang, then he should just stop it. I mean, he's the creator of two hit shows (one of which was a genuine fuckin' pop-culture phenomenon), he directed two hit movies (one of which reignited a franchise), and it's still not enough for the guy? He wants to hear kids on the street calling shit "mint" just so he can feel he made an impact on this planet, I bet.

One day, this guy's gonna drive over to Baskin-Robbins and while standing in line, he's gonna hear some kid go "That's so mint!" and I bet he's gonna have this smug satisfied look on his Regarding Henry-writing face, but then he's going to realize the kid was referring to the Mint Chocolate Chip cone he was tasting. Crushed that not everything in the world revolves around him, J.J.'s gonna do a Charlie Brown walk back to his car and sadly drive home and cry on his giant bed of money, the ungrateful fuck. 

So Slick Charles The Ruler, Elle Fanning and that pussy-ass dead mama's boy Lamb, they're out shooting the zombie flick with their friends at one of those old, out-of-the-way train stops -- when suddenly a pick-up truck drives up the railroad tracks and crashes head-on with an oncoming train, which I'm sure they showed in the trailers and commercials, but I wouldn't know because I never watched them. I knew about this movie, I knew the title, I knew who was behind it, but that was it. I'm pretty good about blocking shit out, even when I'm on the internet (and in exchange for my movie-spoiler-blocking abilities, I was also cursed with a hyper-sensitivity of my everyday surroundings) and all I have to do to avoid spoilers in a movie trailer is look away. So, I don't know about you guys, but I was all like Holy Shit when that train crash happened because I sure wasn't expecting it. 

Part of my Holy Shit reaction came from how scary/impressive the train crash/derailment looked, and the other part of the Holy Shit reaction came from watching these kids end up in serious danger and that's something you don't see that much of these days -- kids mercilessly tossed into serious life and death shit. Fuckin' flaming metal debris is crashing all around them, some of them are crying, one's even throwing up from his fuckin' shattered nerves, and the awesome Ben Burtt-esque sound design is just as unforgiving and insane as all that twisted burning steel trying to murderize these children. Harrison Ford in The Fugitive is a pussy compared to these kids. It's a scary scene, is what I'm trying to say.

Anyway, it turns out the guy who crashed his pick-up truck into the train also happens to be like the only Black dude who lives in that small town, and I guess if you're the kind of person to get all racially sensitive about this shit in movies then now's the time to go Why Does It Have To Be A Black Man? But then later on you find out that this dude was actually pretty righteous, trying to do some good -- but then the same racially sensitive people can complain about him being a variation of the Wise Magical Negro.

And yet if the filmmakers cast a White dude in that role, then you'd hear complaints about how there are no Black people in this movie (actually, there's about 3 and one tense scene even possibly appears to be making a humorous statement on the expendability of Black guys in general) and basically Nobody Wins when it comes to representations of race in movies. The way I see it, if you're a filmmaker, you're fucked when it comes to how you represent race and ethnicity, so just put on your Racist hat and dive right in like it's the 70's again, because since you're a racist either way, you might as well enjoy it, you fuckin' racist. See what I mean? 

Anyway, the military gets involved in cleaning up the train crash mess, and in old-school Spielberg style, these guys are scary, secretive, and probably evil too because the government in these kinds of movies are usually up to no good. See, the beauty of this film and old-school Spielberg joints is that conservatives and liberals can get together on them; your jacking-it-to-Glenn Beck types watch these feds do their thing in Super 8 or Close Encounters of the Third Kind and go "You see? This movie tells us that we can't trust the government!" while forgetting that this is a science-fiction fantasy, and then Rachel-Maddow-Can-Do-No-Wrong types apparently have some perverted fantasy about their precious government doing rank shit behind the public's back, considering that it's mostly liberals who make these movies in the first place. 

I noticed Spielberg's name was featured on the poster outside about as prominently as Abrams' and after watching the movie, I can see why; an alternate title for this movie could've been called Thank You For My Childhood, Mr. Spielberg, I Love You (But Not In A Gay Way) because it plays like a cover of that Asperger's Syndrome-having motherfucker's greatest hits. It's mostly a E.T. The Extra Terrestrial meets Close Encounters vibe going on here, but Abrams wisely adds his own nasty little touches to it.

This felt like J.J. Abrams' version of Grindhouse, only instead of paying homage to drive-in/exploitation movies, he's paying tribute to the kind of awesome suburban adventures that guys like Spielberg, Joe Dante, et al., used to make, back when the best way to watch a movie wasn't in 3D or IMAX or Fake IMAX, but in 70mm and 6-Track Dolby Stereo. Unfortunately, the overall result feels less like a recreation of the kind of movie that is fondly remembered for its quality and feels more like a recreation of a movie that is fondly remembered purely for nostalgia. 

Listen, the movie is very well-made and it's worth watching, and hell, for the first half of the movie I was ready to say this was just as fuckin' great as an old-school Spielberg joint, but then somewhere during the back half of this film, I felt like the train derailment from the movie ended up serving as a metaphor for Super 8 itself -- the shit rolls along beautifully until something gets its path and fucks it all up, damn near leaving a fiery mess at the end. OK, that's a little too harsh.

Perhaps a better way to put it is by using Spielberg movies and their varying qualities; Super 8 is 70 percent E.T./Close Encounters and 30 percent Minority Report. The movie starts off Promising, speeds on down towards Greatness, then makes an unexpected left-turn to Good, and that's a tad disappointing because goddammit, we saw that we were approaching Greatness, it was on the fuckin' horizon, and we certainly had the gas to make the mileage, so why did my driver chicken out and take the nearest exit? 

It's like Abrams can shoot like Spielberg and cast like Spielberg and production design like Spielberg, but he can't duplicate the missing ingredient of Genuine Fuckin' Emotion like Spielberg. He surely tries his absolute hardest to pull it off, but he can't; it's that whole "fails to stick the landing" deal. So while you have the occasional spectacular setpiece that is even more impressively crafted in today's age of Shoot The Shit Out Of It and Edit The Fuck Into It, you're also left watching dramatic scenes that look and sound like they should make you tear up and sniffle, but they don't because they're missing that emotional...you know...that emotional, uh, I don't know what. It's missing that extra oomph, I guess. 

I was left watching with this unfortunate sense of detachment and the last fuckin' thing a Spielberg movie -- or a wannabe Spielberg movie, for that matter -- should have you feeling is detached. Say what you will about the guy, but most of Spielberg's movies (his good ones, anyway) are sentimental motherfuckers, and I think it's because the dude was totally putting his heart into those flicks back then. Of course, Spielberg is now the long-time ruler/king of Hollywood, and he's proven himself a hundred times over, and he's a family man and his bank accounts have dollars on their dollars, and as a result, his popcorn spectacles now feel like obligatory Give Them What They Want works that engage the senses but not the fuckin' soul. 

And that's kinda how Super 8 ended up feeling to me; the final shot before the credits has this beautiful Michael Giacchino music that's basically slapping John Williams in his old man face and demanding that he step up before the young gunslinger takes him out like a bitch in front of the whole town, and it's all shot with this very reverent Wow Oh My God Wow style, and all of this shit should be tugging my fuckin' heartstrings but instead all I'm thinking is "Ah yes, I see what he's doing, this is where the audience would begin to cry." 

Motherfucker. I should be embarrassing myself in the theater by crying like Bradley Cooper on Inside The Actor's Studio, not thinking how impressive it is that Abrams almost made this look and feel like a Spielberg joint. What makes this even more painful to write is that I'm sure Abrams DID put his heart and soul into this movie; maybe he just probably expelled all that energy into working the surface, but had nothing left for the core, if that makes any sense and I'm sure it doesn't. There's nothing wrong with Good, But Not Great, but it does sting a bit when a movie is Great, But Then Good. There's an end credits sequence that I wish I could say was the cherry on top of the sundae for this movie, but sadly, compared to the movie that preceded it, it was the entire sundae while the movie was mostly vegetables. Jesus Christ, it really is always about food for me, isn't it?

Hey, by the way -- fuck Bradley Cooper. I'm sure he's a nice guy but fuck that guy; women swoon when he speaks French and go AWWW when he cries, and I guess that's OK because he's a great-looking guy. Yet if I do the same thing, these same women would call me a pretentious faggot. C'mon girls, Bradley Cooper's got better things to do, and you're not among them. A guy like me, on the other hand, I have no shame and can be easily molded to fit your standards, so it should be my out-of-shape ugly goods you should be after, not his. Because let's be real -- the closest you're gonna come to getting fucked by Bradley Cooper is when you pay full price to see The Hangover Part III.