Roger Ebert is a sick man and we should respect his words. But we’re not. And lately a new wave of young reckless CGI mongers and their hordes of sugar-charged fans are making Ebert’s last years an uphill slog against seemingly insurmountable forces. Between G.I Joe, Transformers II, and cancer, our elder statesman of movie reviews has born a tremendous burden. And Gamer might be the deathblow that finally breaks his back. I haven’t seen any of his comments regarding its release, but I am going to venture a few guesses here.

Ala G.I. Joe, it’s almost guaranteed that Gamer’s producers will not allow screenings before it comes out. The logic behind this approach is simple: film critics have all these bad things like educated opinions and an appreciation for subtletly, plot, and dialogue. As Rob Moore, the vice president of Paramount Pictures put it, “G.I. Joe is a big, fun, summer event movie — one that we’ve seen audiences enjoy everywhere from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to Phoenix, Arizona. After the chasm we experienced with Transformers 2 between the response of audiences and critics, we chose to forgo opening-day print and broadcast reviews as a strategy to promote G.I. Joe. We want audiences to define this film.”

This is straight out of the McCain/Palin straight talk playbook. Besides the obvious pandering to military families and the disgruntled flag wavers in McCain’s home state, this approach virtually ensures that movie criticism, like any form of non-Fox and Friends criticism, is marginalized, perhaps permanently. Consider how well other important things that were not screened turned out, like the Iraq War.

That Gamer’s premise is idiotic is a truism. What’s more interesting is that it is co-directed by the folks who brought us Crank 2: High Voltage. Their CVs start there. I imagine that before this, Mark Nevildine and Brian Taylor were making battle bots, or maybe driving the RedBull truck. That these two are cashing checks from Lionsgate is even more frightening.

Gamer promises to be a perfect storm. Consider it: Gerard Butler, whose career is permanently tied to his overwrought role as King Leonidas, lives in a world that is kind of sort of exactly like a multiplayer game. Already they’ve preemptively avoided potential critiques of verisimilitude: “It’s just a game, Roger, nougattaboutit!” Secondly, it is guaranteed to attract the best and brightest demographic this country has to offer: the same folks who squeezed their fat asses into Muvicos to drown out their weekend with Jamaican space robots and G.I. Wayans.

Next, by recycling the same “is it virtual or is is real?” trope we were glad to see die with Matrix 3 and Stay Alive, it indefinitely extends a bankrupt genre and paves the way for yearly sequels in the grand tradition of the Saw franchise: Gamer, Gamer II, Gamer XI. And why not? Without fail, every time a new Saw comes out it immediately becomes the top grossing film in the nation and ensures that anything not involving reverse bear traps and immolation is drowned in the slimy liquid viscera of rotting pigs.

By basing its story on an online game, Gamer forgoes the question of whether an extremely profitable, multiplayer online game featuring Gerard Butler as a man trapped in a multiplayer online game, will be released within weeks of its premier, completing the MakemoneyMakemoneyPutItInTheBank trifecta that G.I. Joe and company set up. All the ingredients are there. You’ve got an unforgettable strong man, you’ve got the collective fan base of every Gears of War/Halo shoot-em-up champing at the bit, and more importantly, you have Hollywood’s solemn promise that critics and their big words can suck the computer generated dick of modern American action cinema.

I don’t think we’ve fully appreciated the changes brought on by the exponential rise in technological dependency in the past five years. From Wikipedia, to personal GPS, to Facebook, facts best left alone can be cross-referenced, uploaded to a page containing one thousand “friends” you’ve never met, then explored in frightening detail via Google Street. Why get dressed and leave your house when you can walk down virtual boulevards at the click of a mouse? After all, the blurred digital ghosts of those unfortunate enough to be burned onto the server at the time of image capture are a lot less bothersome than real people.

It’s too easy to be one sided when it comes to this kind of bitching. We all know how hard it would be to go back to the days of filling out endless paperwork and sticking little squares on the corners of letters every time you had a question or wanted to catch up with a friend. I don’t pretend to glamorize the pre-internet days, or to cast the people who lived then as any more interesting than people glued to their Ipods today. But we have to take an honest to God look at things for a minute because something has been lost. I cannot place it, but some previously unnoticed, unspoken cosmic agreement has been subjected to high speed digital rape and now it’s naked and crying on the floor.

It’s vaguely unsettling to consider that as I type this, the loud, frequently shirtless man who lives above me is streaming over five genres of internet pornography through my body over a pirated wireless network: a hi definition Lexi Belle money shot ripping through my lower intestine at 200 kbps; bootlegged, torrented .rar zip files of top grossing Pirates of the Caribbean porn crossovers lighting up my nervous system like a pinball machine.

It’s more than a little obnoxious when millenniums-old evolutionary reflexes like turning when someone addresses you are rendered obsolete now that every single person walking down a residential neighborhood is on a cellular phone; or that quaint, old fashioned things like punctuation and intelligible syntax are shouldered out of the way by emoticons and incoherent Lolspeak in the rare chance that someone takes the time to sit down to write a lengthy “email” from an antiquated “desktop” computer.

Blue tooth, Iphones, Twitter, Myspace, MyFriends (this exists). When the internet debuted in the mid 90s, surely no one could have foreseen the tidal waves of unnecessary applications that have sprung up and made billionaires out of their wily twenty-something inventors. The oft-touted “tech bubble” of the late nineties which famously burst to Pets.com stockholders’ discontent pales in comparison to the virtual upwelling of online waste we’re facing in 2009. The apotheosis of the blogsphere can be defined by two themes: an overwhelming, relentless invasion of privacy, and the smug, overly enthusiastic, Second Coming of Christ fervor with which proponents pitch their products.

You don’t have a Twitter? Getouttahere! I am going to be twenty-five in two days and I have a master’s degree and I still do not know what a fucking Twitter is. Is it a verb, is it a device that cries in the night and asks for pretend digital food so it will shut up? No idea. Apparently it’s infiltrated the highest offices of the land. In fact, now you can “RSS” President Obama’s very own Twitter and be reminded via your shiny new BlackBerry Pearl Flip that he just “tweeted” a new law that says you can keep collecting unemployment.

Remember when people had to lift their fat asses out of their chairs and amble to the library if they wanted to write a paper or sound intelligent before a presentation? Well that’s boring and slow. “Youtube” any given historical episode or philosophical issue (One of the highpoints in the Internet’s debasement of the English language is its convenient use of proper nouns that double as verbs: i.e. you can “Google” something on its eponymous search engine) and you’re bombarded with at least three hundred poorly framed mugshots of greasy pseudo intellectuals begging for the love mom and dad never gave them.

In a post long since deleted, but less easily forgotten, I was privileged enough to watch two men in their late thirties shout at each other about the non-existence of God from their parents’ basements. One had draped a giant marijuana flag behind him and was screaming profanities at the other man. The other was mumbling something about how he had to go because his dad hit him when he found him blogging at 3am. All of it was important and I learned a great deal.

We stand at a critical juncture in the war against the machines. And we’ve conditioned ourselves through deep immersion in movies like the Matrix and Terminator I, II, III, and IV to see the final wars as ones fought between ragtag bands of survivors on post-apocalyptic wastelands, as ultimate showdowns between red-eyed death bots and an actor who cannot escape his role as the Dark Knight. But something far more terrifying has occurred. The fact that we not only accept, but wholeheartedly endorse Facebook “pokes” and Instant Messages transmitted from aircraft flying at 30,000 feet via X-Band Satelite radio, passed along by live RSS Twitter feeds from Huffington Post comment forums which are stored in underground servers whose owners’ 401k’s are maturing in offshore tax-havens means the battle’s over. The machines already won. If you had the patience to read this, you are the resistence.

Year One.

I didn’t really have high hopes for this movie. I was just going to take it at face value and leave the theater happy that I had lost track of another hour and a half. It just couldn’t be that easy though.

Have you read the title for this movie? Year One. That’s it. After that the joke is old.

Every 30 seconds they throw some sort of scenario in that goes as follows,

“Dude, I know that this is year one, but the AUDIENCE is in the year 2009! So they need us to constantly remind them how this isn’t 2009 because the title just isn’t enough!”

This is the reason that Isaac is some sort of young G. Need more proof? Horatio Sanz is in this movie.

People in the cross hairs of my Daisy Rider-

Jack Black: I am a fan of Jack Black. Disagree all you want but I think he’s a really funny guy and his performances in Saving Silverman, Orange County, King Kong (threw that in to see if you’re still reading) and Tenacious D are brilliant. The problem is that Jack Black only plays roles now that might as well be named Jack Black. There have been some good movies recently like Be Kind, Rewind and Tropic Thunder to counter my argument, but if you try to tell me I’m wrong then I’m not listening.

“George” Michael Cera:That’s really it. I’m also a huge fan of George-Michael Bluth. Some people told me a few years back that George-Michael is not the actors name and that his real name is Michael Cera. That’s bullshit. This guy is George-Michael Bluth and that’s the end of the argument. Show me anything that he has done since Arrested Development where he plays another character. Juno? Wrong. It’s George-Michael running.

All of George-Michaels’ movies have the same formula. Straight man to the funny man and then the funny man takes it too far and George-Michael gets upset and the relationship or infinite playlist is put in jeopardy. Don’t worry because he’s quick to forgive.

Harold Ramis: You need to stop it. Remember these heavy hitters you were a part of? Animal House, Meatballs, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day? These are movies that I think of as comedy royalty and you are responsible for them.

Do you also remember these movies? Armed and Dangerous, Bedazzled, Year One, and Meatballs 2010?

The first one I’ll cut you slack on because it has it’s funny moments. Bedazzled I’ll let you slide on because I would write a story about a monkey astronaut who saves Earth from an asteroid and even let Harland Williams direct it if it got Liz Hurley into a bikini. So I understand. I will not be forgiving you for Year One and so help me God if you go through with a Meatballs remake or the screw up this new Ghostbusters movie I will hunt you down.

Ok. So I know some of you are out there saying that I’m being to harsh on this movie and it’s actors. Nope. This is the nice stuff.

How about we review the scene (notice I wrote “scene” not “scenes” which might be excusable) where Jack Black and George-Michael both ask out their respective love interests who both reply with the same line. Think I’m wrong? Let’s compare lines.

Girl one when asked by Jack Black if they can do something later.
“I’m a slave. And I don’t get breaks.”

Juno Temple when George-Michale says they should hang out and asks when she gets off.
“Never. I’m a slave.”

These lines are about 30 seconds apart.

Juno Temple? Why are you in this movie? You have some pretty legitimate acting credentials and just got cast as Ophelia in an adaptation of Hamlet. This is a role for Camilla Belle who played this exact role in another film that I wrote about. Everybody gets one. Don’t repeat this.

Am I being too harsh on this movie? Wait. I already used that line. Damn you Year One. Fuck it. No, I’m not being too harsh. This movie was too harsh on my brain.

I’ll repeat another line here. If you read the title of the movie, the joke is already old.

I know it’s breaking the rules to write about movies you like here, but hear me out, people. Now that I don’t have cable or live with my parents, I can’t count on Cinemax and Showtime to provide me with a nonstop backlog of horrible films to post about. These days, I wake up, have my coffee, grade my papers, and don’t feel guilty when I cash my check.

But something is missing. Interminable action scenes and grade-z dialogue used to ease those sleepless nights in a way books couldn’t. Cheering James Woods on as he blasted another vampire schmuck was my Sports Center. It felt good to sip that Newcastle and watch Charlie’s Angels full-throttle-skydive-hijack a poorly rendered cgi helicopter that careened off an exploding truck which was itself free falling two thousand feet off a Mongolian dam. After a stressful day it was strangely calming to know that it was Donny Wahlberg, not you, whose head was being smashed by giant ice blocks.

But bad movies take their toll. And at no time was this more apparent than when I reactivated my Netflix account and added real films to the queue. Goddard, Bergman, Rohmer, nothing was too pretentious. I needed a reeducation in the classics, and for $18 dollars a month I couldn’t refuse. Claire’s Knee, Breathless, Persona - how I’d waited so long to catch up I can’t say. With every long sweep of the New Wave lens across a tree lined boulevard a talking robot asking Shia LaBeouf about Ebay was erased from memory. For every graceful step Anna Karina and Bibi Andersson took, a semi-coked Demi Moore slow motion backflipped into oblivion.

Before, I’d recommend seeing Running Scared or Charlies Angels 2 because there’s a perverse joy in watching millions of dollars utterly wasted when you live week to week and the global economy is disintegrating. There is something beautiful and terrible in films so devoid of plot that they have to resort to unabashed female exploitation and near constant wire fight sequences to draw crowds.

With a few foreign classics under my belt I’ve taken a more sober approach to this business. It’s getting harder for me to call up Peter and rehash an old joke about Crispin Glover’s miscast roles or Uwe Boll’s persistent rejection of cosmic standards of decency. I find myself wanting to share some of the things I’ve enjoyed over the past six months. I find myself wanting to help you.

Stranger Than Paradise, directed by low-fi connoisseur Jim Jarmusch is a good place to start. Shot in black and white on a shoestring budget, this understated gem starts off slowly but quickly grows on you. The somber performances of John Lurie and his adorable Hungarian cousin, and Jarmusch’s light touch are a welcome respite from the hi-res picture-in-picture Vantage Point thrill ride whodunits we’re bombarded with today. It’s what a quiet movie should be: largely uneventful and subtly endearing. Replete with well timed cuts and thoughtful dialogue, it’s a rare thing to behold in an age where its bleak landscapes and minute-long dramatic silences would have junior reaching for his chocolate covered party pretzel while he tweets how much it sucks.

It’s the Bottle Rocket of the eighties, the weird, road trip-gone-wrong-but-hey all’s well that ends well-sleeper whose dialogue is based on real people saying mundane things. Conspicuously absent are gratuitous wide angle fade-ins of Cameron Diaz’s ass, references to the secret glasses Benjamin Franklin wore to draft the Constitution, or golden retrievers who catch footballs and win the big game.

I’ll forgo the long winded, likely pretentious exploration of the deep existential themes of Stranger than Paradise or its place in the pantheon of indie cinema. All I’m saying is give these movies a chance. It’s not easy to throw yourself into the freezing lake of good acting, but to keep sitting in the 140 degree jacuzzi of Bruckheimer-Bay Fuckhouse Productions with all the jets going, watching Ultimate Fighting and smashing empty Bud Lime bottles against the door, isn’t healthy either.

The Old Lady has one of her Master’s classes downtown on Wednesday nights. This is the one night a week that I live my life in manner that possesses any semblance of a bachelor’s life. I get home from work around 6:15 or so on Wednesdays. From that point to 7, I typically let my dog out so she can make on the neighbor’s lawn and then I feed her and myself (Wednesday is Science Diet and Hot Dogs Nite for the both of us). I dedicate seven o’clock to eight to That’s So Raven reruns and a jumbo jar full of pickled herring and sour cream. Eight o’clock to nine is usually the time where I can squeeze in a few chapters of one of those trashy novels. You know, Hemingway or something. I like my books to be full of nothing but muscles and filthy jokes that culminate in the kind of over-the-top homoeroticism you can only find in the Abercrombie & Fitch: Summer is A-comin’ catalog. After nine, your guess is as good as mine. I’m usually too far off the wagon to find. The folks at Oregon Trail call it dysentery, but really I’m just face-wasted full of Loose Tooth Sam’s Special Sauce.

I do faintly recall some events from this past Wednesday night, which is what leads me to the topic of our post. It was nine o’clock and Cara wouldn’t be home until half past ten. I did the math, and two minutes later I discovered that I had an hour and twenty eight minutes of bachelordom left, which is just around the same amount of time that it takes to watch a standard-length, 88-minute film. After perusing my home video collection, which is full of such classics as Reba: Season 1 and 120 Westerns on 6 Discs, I remembered that I’m supposed to write message posts for this website called ManPantiesDotCom. My cablebox has this button that makes movies show on the teevee, so I clicked that button and decided to sacrifice the rest of my night to the Oompa Loompa known as Pauly Shore.

Jury Duty starts off just like any other movie. Pauly Shore is an ambiguously-aged, out-of-work mama’s boy who is left to survive on his lonesome, aside from his bite-sized pal Peanut the Dog. So he tracks down his jury duty notice slip (which was probably sitting right next to mine—in the garbage bin!!!). Then he gets a free lunch and stays at a hotel. Then he delays the jury from agreeing on a verdict of the seemingly-cut-and-dry trial. Even though I basically told you the whole movie and you don’t really NEED to see it now, I would watch this movie again one hundred times in a row. It was SO good, and the reason is it is, is because of. This movie has so many good qualities. Pauly Shore had a surprisingly good body. Don’t worry, I’m not spoiling anything for those of you who managed to make it fourteen dull years without this visual party to lighten your load.

I honestly think that all of the law schools in the country should toss out those old books like The Constitution and simply slip this tape into the VRC. You want your jerbelus indoctrinate? Rent this movie! It is probably available on DVD, but maybe not.

Pauly Shore has so many voices that are so funny. Also, and, not to forget, additionally, there’s that tiny dog I mentioned. Tia Carerre is also in this movie, and she has boobs. So that’s always okay. Also there’s a twist ending. Surprise!

Dear Reader, you might have noticed that the quality of my writing has diminished in the last several paragraphs. That is because I am up to my ears in hallucinated hippopotamuses. Contrary to popular belief, they are not hungry hungry. They are in fact just kind of obnoxious, not unlike Pauly Shore in the hit movie from last century Jury Duty.  Peter, where the hell is my jar of white lightning?

I watched Bedazzled and Cop and a half back to back on HBO the other day. The worst part is that I repeated it on HBO West immediately. This is a true story and if anyone can please rescue me from Bruckheimer Manor that would be great. Send Jack Bauer if you have to just send someone.

Update: Jerry has a copy of Adrenalin: Fear the Rush in his hands. Jesus.

Last weekend I headed down to the local megaplex to plop down and spend a couple of hours in front of Wolverine Origins. Being a Sunday evening, I decided to forgo the 6$ 2-pints and a popcorn deal (one pint is for me, and the other pint is also for me), which was probably the biggest mistake of the week. I’ve never been a huge X-fan, but they are Jaime’s favorite super heroes, so while I felt that maybe a lack of fan recognition dulled the experience for me, she said that she alternated between being incredibly bored and incredibly angry, which I don’t think is the emotional impact the director was going for.

The thing is, though, I can see what kind of movie this is, and I think that we’ve all been lied to. This wasn’t a prequel- this was actually the first movie in a planned trilogy, scrapped at the last minute and eventually replaced in line by X-3, a big enough mistake that the studio decided to release part one retroactively. Because if this insanely illogical explanation ISN’T true, then, seriously, what the fuck, Marvel?

This movie FEELS like the kind fo superhero movie that would have been made at about the same time as the first X-Men movie. Think back to 2000, when X-Meni came out. It had been ages since a comic book series had been given a real Hollywood treatment. Spiderman won’t come out for 2 years, Hulk for three, and Batman Begins is a whopping 5 years away. Batman and Robin  was a debacle and, to a lot of people, was the probably the comic-bookiest of the original Batman series, so X-Men was a decidely low key affair. Sure they were still the X-Men, but look at the roster- Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops- fan favorites and classics, and characters that tend to be a little less out there than the furry Beast, or even Nightcrawler. The costumes are rather plain leather, instead of the flamboyant monstrosities the superfolk in BaR wore. The story bore only vaint resemblances and references to most of the original plot points, with Rogue taking Jubilee’s place as the young, naive Wolverine obsessed new kid, and Sabretooth acting as a standard bruiser for Magneto. Other characters show up as quick cameos and references, often not bothering with names, and definitely not the more familiar character names. It was a ‘realistic’ X-Men, because that’s what the studios thought people wanted, and it was an X-Men that was not very true to its roots, because nobody reads comic right?

And at the time we were ok with it. It was a decent movie, there’s Wolverine slashing crap, there’s Cyclops blasting shit and being an uptight prick, and there’s Patrick Stuart as himself, I guess. Lots of action, plot to hook it all together, bam, done.

And then we got Spiderman, which really DIDN’T realism it up- here’s Peter Parker, wearing a bright red spider suit, fighting a guy in a goblin mask who does in fact throw bombs shaped like pumpkins. X-Men 2 ups the plot quotient, and despite its pretentions to mainstream pandering, manages to make us think, maybe it’s ok if Wolverine isn’t wearing yellow spandex- and then BAM, Spiderman 2  managing to give us movies equal parts action and other stuff, while maintaining absurd comic trappings, making me, at least, think- Hey, why COULDN’T Storm be wearing a bright white dress with a cape?

The X-series just feels more and more dated to me; Iron Man was gloriously comicy, and did great, while Dark Knight took the ‘realistic’ comic pretention and made something amazing. X3 was crap, and with all of these other films released on the world before it, so is Wolverine. What the fuck, Marvel?

How could you greenlight the use of such a popular character in something that feels so dated? Let’s see…bare bones plot designed to link together action scenes? Check. “Realistic” treatments of iconic characters? Check. (The realistis Blob is just….unsettling). The real crime is in the wholesale use and disposal of popular characters. Loads of mutants have cameos, some for only a split second to allow you to glimpse their power; they are never explained, never named, never discussed, just there. If you aren’t a fan, you won’t know their names, and if you are, you’ll be annoyed they are there at all. The worse crime is the depiction of Deadpool. I forgot, I need to add: completely butchering an origin story and applying a bullshit background and powers to a popular character, who ends up being nothing even slightly like the character that actually became popular in the first place. Take a fast talking, jerky superassasin originally meant as a joke, vaguely referene his origin story while changing all of the specifics give him the combined powers of Cyclops, the poor man’s Nightcrawler, adamantium bones, retractable katanas instead of claws, and then rob him of his two most defining features: his costume and his wisecracking, and you end up with a character that probably shouldn’t have been named Deadpool. In the comics, his nickname is “the merc with the mouth”, but by the time Ryan Reynolds actually becomes Deadpool, they have surgically melted his mouth shut so he can’t talk. That’s the kind of thing that I have to assume is a jerky, ironic statement, because it’s too much of a concidence to be an accident of bad film making.

The rest of the movie is pretty bland, alternating between boring talking, hyper melodramatic non-emotional peaks, and some ok action with oddly bad CGI. Hugh Jackman is still a good Wolverine, and Liev Schriber has a difficult to spell name, and was also pretty good as Sabretooth. He wasn’t really Sabretooth, but he was fun to watch, and I think he may have been from the Bielski Otriat, because I’m pretty sure he had to have been purposefully playing the same character from Defiance. The guy who played Military Rank Stryker was kind of lame, and the character was less an obsessed mad scientist and more a complete douchebag. When he figures out that the only thing that can hurt Wolverine is adamantium bullets (which doesn;t make much sense), he also figured out that all that will do is break his bones not kill him- but that if he shoos him in the head, he’ll lose his memories when his brain heals. So the secret to movie Wolverine’s mysterious amnesia is some asshole who can’t resist causing him at least some discomfort in his life. Thanks for giving us such a bad ass villain. Whoo.

Don’t see it.

A couple Fridays ago, feeling in a particularly romantic frame of mind, I decided to treat myself and my significant other to a night on the town. Opting for a classic combination I went for dinner and a movie, and knowing that nothing stokes the fires of heady romance like chain Mexican and the intense stylings of Nicolas Cage, we set off for Korea’s only On the Border, to be followed by a late night showing of Knowing. Unfortunately, the nation of Korea seems to be far more in love with Cage than the good old USA, and the last showing was nearly sold out. It wasn’t until the next week that I got in to see it, but I was surely not dissapointed. I’d have written it up earlier, but I finally got around to getting cable a few days later, and Korean Fox shows 4 hours of Law and Order SVU after I get home from work so my evenings are pretty much booked.

Somewhere between episodes, I read an article online that suggests Nicolas Cage has gotten so comfortable making a certain kind of movie, he just keeps making it, and comparing Knowing to his other recent movies, particularly Next, it’s easy to agree. He has become firmly attached to that sort of middle of the road thriller, the one you might watch when there’s nothing else at the theater and you have a gift certificate to kill, or maybe when it’s on HBO in a couple of months and there’s no Law and Order on, and then promptly forget about it in a few weeks. They aren’t awful, they aren’t amazing, and if it had been anyone else in the starring role I never would have bothered.

But I am here to suggest that Nicolas Cage knows exactly what he is doing and who he is to the hordes of internet movie bloggers and youTube mashers. Take a quick think about the movies you’ve seen since 2000ish- how many of those were Nicolas Cage movies? Don’t think to far or you’ll remember Adaptation. We’re not talking about that one.

Do you remember Windtalkers?  Did you see Captain Corelli’s Mandolin? My personal Cage rememberectory goes The Rock-Con Air- Face/Off- Gone in 60 Seconds- then a 6 year gap. No Bringing out the Dead, no Captain Corelli, no Adaptation, The Weather Man, not even World Trade Center. It skips straight to Wicker Man, that bear suit, and those fucking bees. I barely remember any of his numerous roles in smaller, theoretically more intellectual films, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. In my mind, at least, Cage was gone, only to re-enter in a glorious comeback double punch of Wicker Man and Ghost Rider. These are the films on which Cage has decided to base his current career trajectory. I firmly believe that his roles now are now chosen and performed with the primary purpose of being as off the wall as possible, allowing would be internet satirists to hastily cobble together best-of, context free reels of footage, either in order to drive up DVD sales or to create a video so viral it transcends the internet, infects its users, and turns them all into living, breathing memes.

Knowing feels like it was specifically crafted to be the initial volley in just such an onslaught. The movie itself was entertaining enough- I actually found it surprisingly tense and creepy, considering the kind of movie I knew it was. Cage plays an astro-something or other scientist, the son of a pastor with whom he’s had a falling out in a subplot that’s generally ignored until the climax. The upswing of this relationship is to cement Cage as a standard scientific skeptic, who doesn’t have much of a spiritual side. The death of his wife in an accidental fire sometime before the movie starts served to take him from mild skeptic to spiritual nihilism, with a firm belief that nothing, every, anywhere, happens for a reason. Given this he’s surprisingly quick to believe that a paper his son receives from a 50 year old time capsule does in fact contain the dates, locations and fatality figures for a series of disasters over the past 50 year. As the movie nfolds his belief becomes cemented by accurate predictions of accidents, participated in by Cage himself. The tension is shattered when at the end of an otherwise tense thriller with a surprisingly down to earth tone, the central conceit notwithstanding, the ending is just fucking absurd. Racing to find a possible solution to the predicted end of the world, Cage absolutely fails. Instead, he sends his son into space with a race of aliens who kind of look like angels, who also happened to be psychic and planted the predictive lists for the sole purpose of getting people to believe that the end of the world was coming, so that they could send their children with them to repopulate some distant planet and save mankind. It didn’t make anymore sense in the movie, and as someone who feels like part of the thrill of a thriller is being involved in the plot and struggling to sort it out along with the characters, this kind of out of nowhere ending just feels like BS. This is why I do not like M. Night Shyamalan movies either. Well, that and everything else about them.

Now I know you’re probably saying “Ben, why did you give me a plot synopsis? What if I wanted to see this movie?” Well, shut up. You know damn well the ONLY reason you would see this movie would be to see if Nicolas Cage can out crazy himself, and he delivers like no one else can. the plot synopsis was for your benefit as you struggle to put the following examples in context. In the course of this 2 hour movie, they manage to pack in so many insane Cage-isms that it became obvious to me that Nicolas Cage has to be in on the joke. You can see Nicolas Cage:

1) Drink 3 bottles of whisky in a single scene

2) Seem to forget a certain significant event that happened on 9/11/01, and then be absolutely shocked after quickly Googling it.

3) Get overexcited doing math drunk and rip a mounted whiteboard off of a kitchen wall in order to continue his mathemaniacal rampage

4) Scream while hitting a tree with a baseball bat

5) Driving a car with an intense look on his face and a pistol in his left hand, which is on the steering wheel as he moves the wheel back and forth like your 4 year old nephew pretending his high chair is a truck

6) Drive a truck over a curb so hard all four tires leave the ground, turning around in a gast station parking lot

7) Scream “THE RADIATION WILL PENETRATE 2 MILES INTO THE EARTH’S CRUST!”

8) Duck out of the way to avoid being hit by a falling airplane

9) Use his body to save a pregnant woman, as a derailed subway car is completely destroyed, but not so badly that they can’t get up and walk away while everyone else dies

10) Fall to his knees with the most amazing dumbfounded/mindblown expression on seeing the alien ships.

11) Stalk a woman, then tell her ” It’s OK, I’m n astrophysicist”. he then flashes some sort of badge(?)

I know this doesn’t sound like much but, playing it back in my mind, it easily matches the Wicker Man mashup reels for absolute out of context insanity, and I have to believe that the man knows it. This is the Cage-iest movie I have ever seen, and it feels very purposeful- scenes that could have been played in a much more muted way are just completely overblown, while scenes that should be emotional are playeed with emotions so subtle I think he just forgot to act. It’s every little tick or oddity that he has ever been accused of having, all rolled up into one role. I think Nicolas Cage is entertaining because of those quirks and because of who he is, or at least who I think he is, and Knowing definitely didn’t dissapoint me there. Cage’s presence took a middle-brow thriller and elevated it to something I remember enough about to write up a week or so later, and that’s saying something. For those of you where gas to the theater and a movieticket will cost you more than my monthly electric bill, keep a lookout for that mashup video on YouTube real soon.

I saw Obsessed.

This movie stars part-time talent/Jay-Z’s shorty Beyonce Knowles with that one chick who was in a whip cream bikini in Varsity Blues and does that shitty Heroes show. We also have the incomparable Idris Elba. Who is Idris Elba? He plays Charles Minor in this season of The Office. I don’t care either.

When I watched Obsessed I dressed in my best movie outfit that was clean on the floor. I did perform a sniff check so it was ruled alright for going outside. I went to my local Blockbuster and rented Play Misty for Me, Swimfan, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Fatal Attraction, Season 1 of Flight of the Conchords.

I watched them. I cried because of them being on. I nearly died from exposure. Damn it I wish I had a job holding signs!

I went on youtube and watched the trailer for Obsessed again and then started this review. I really don’t need to see anything else to give a review of this movie. It’s the same thing all over again.

“Bitch thinks that she’s gettin’ loved but she really gettin’ loved on. Y’all feelin’ me?” - Jay-Z

Well done Jay-Z. You must have had an advance screening of this movie also. Blockbuster membership has its rewards sir and you have cashed in handsomely.

Here is my favorite part of the trailer:

Beyonce gets angry because the Heroes lady is acting crazy. “Uh Oh, uh oh, uh oh, oh oh oh oh” Beyonce is crazy in love and screams, “I’ma show you crazy!”

She promptly shows her crazy.

This movie would have slipped past my radar under most circumstances. I do have the Sci Fi channel premier of Carny coming up this weekend. Pretty busy guy. The thing that made me look at this movie again was the uncomfortable racial undertone here.

This might just be me, if it is then just don’t comment on this post and let it slip past your radar like this movie should have slipped past mine, but there really seems to be a theme of “crazy interracial couple movies” coming out lately. This movie doesn’t technically have an interracial couple but it uses Ali Larter’s attempt to seduce a black man to portray the idea that an interracial couple should be crazy.

Another one of these movies was Lakeview Terrace. This entire movie was based on an interracial couple driving their neighbor crazy. It seems like the mid-level budget movies are starting to use this theme more often as a way to make a quick buck.

I have dated girls of different races and never saw it as a problem or something “crazy.”

Maybe I should have taken a page from Beyonce’s book.

Hollywood….I’ma show you crazy!

Body of Lies

Russellardo DiCapricrowe stars as a CIA superspy and his boss, respectively. This an Important political-flavored action thriller set in the Middle East in nations so underdeveloped they don’t even have camera tripods. Basically this movie is like an overlong episode of 24 minus all the unapologetic Patriotism that makes that show awesome and easy to understand. Body of Lies was probably produced by the Obama campaign to help America transition from the “Yeah, war can be shitty sometimes but hey this espionage stuff sure is fun ain’t it!” mentality of beer-bellied CIA desk jockeys to the whiny bleeding heart histrionics you usually hear from scrappy young field agents who think they’re wise beyond their years just because they grew a goatee and survived a few explosions.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I didn’t really understand this movie. Russellardo are looking for some terrorist guy and bringing him down is not going to be easy. They’re going to have to navigate through a whole bunch of lies. A body of lies, if you will. This movie was okay, but there were so many missed opportunities to kick it up to the next level. I wish Iron Man stopped by for a cameo during that bunker scene. Why couldn’t James Bond join in for a bit and lend a helping hand? And finally, in a movie in which Russell Crowe spends 90% of his screen time talking on the phone, at least one of those calls should have had Al Pacino on the other end, yelling at Crowe, telling him that he fought for him and he’s still fighting for him. Real shit, though, here are some cool things I learned from Body of Lies:

- Trust no one. Deceive everyone.
- You can’t run an operation when someone else is running a side operation.
- If you can make it look like anything, you should probably make it look like everything.

Also, what is this stuff about Russell Crowe gaining weight for his roles? “Headline: Russell Crowe fattens up to play a pudgy tobacco company scientist! Russell Crowe lets himself go to play a pudgy CIA agent! Russell Crowe packs on the pounds to play a pudgy newspaper reporter!” I’m beginning to suspect that Russell Crowe is just plain pudgy. And that’s fine. Plus, his role in LA Confidential gets him a lifetime pass. At this point though he’s probably got it in his contract that he only plays characters with love handles.

“Russell, it’s your agent. How’d you like to play, get this, a bank robber…”
“Eh.”
“Okay, okay. What about… a pudgy bank robber?”
“I’m listening…”

But really though, props to Ridley Scott and all the others who made this movie happen. It was pretty okay. After Blood Diamond, The 11th Hour, and this, I can’t wait for Leonardo DiCaprio’s next potshot at international corruption and American indifference.

The Spirit

If it seems like I’m in a bad mood, I am. Because I watched Body of Lies back to back with The Spirit. Yeah, I know I’m late to this party but goddamn that is one of the dumbest fucking movies I’ve ever seen. Good gosh. If you think that based on all twitters, blogs, and possibly even vlogs you saw about this movie, you know what kind of awfulness to expect from The Spirit-trust me you are wrong. It is that bad and more so. But the sad thing is that for all its spectacular stupidity, at the end of the day it’s really 49% fun bad and 51% bad bad. And that’s too bad.