Ten Statements About....THE ADVENTURES OF ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE (2000)

You, too, can have this stupified expression...just watch this
film!

"How many times in the past have they stood between me and my dreams of glory? How many times have they foiled my plans with their bungling interference?"
"Errr...28?"

1) The opening few minutes, that begins with a proscenium arc and includes the lengthy animated 'since last you saw them' sequence, makes you think this film will actually work. The voice of the old show is intact, as is the humor. And then, once the film is fully eased into the live action setting....it all goes horribly wrong.

2) And the fundamental problem with the film is how it establishes that the most significant characters of the cartoon have entered into the real world....but the difference between the 'real world' and the cartoon world is negligible. Hell, the script by Kenneth Lonergan isn't really clear about the actual rules of this version of reality--the opening makes a clear demarcation between the real world and the cartoon one, yet when we get to Wossamatta U, there's this whole anti-cartoon protest rally and a gag about the college getting real world status after the cancellation, and....

If the rules of the world you're building doesn't make sense, your movie won't make sense.

You should be tying up the writers and producers of this
film, Rocky...it's not those actors' fault....

3) I know that when this film came out there was a lot of brickbats thrown at Robert deNiro for playing Fearless Leader. But he does the best he can with this underwritten role, as does Rene Russo, who is scary in how much she seems to have channeled Natasha. No, the worst villain performance is Jason Alexander's, whose Boris is so broad they could build a whole airplane hanger with it. It's downright painful to watch his exaggerated mugging, and that weird-ass mustache distracts you every time we see him in close-up.

4) Also shockingly awful is Piper Perabo's Karen Patience. Like Alexander, Perabo overplays her character to a degree that makes her every pronouncement winge-worthy....and the film does her no favor by giving her a wardrobe and a make-up job that's unflattering in the extreme. If she's supposed to be the audience's POV character, the film fails in that respect.

5) Usually I would hate all the 'fish out of water' gags....except that said gags in this film certainly plug into the whole Bullwinkle 'malapropisms/misunderstandings' aspect of that character's personality. It makes sense here, as does the very strict moral sense of Rocky.

What did jar was the one gag about Bullwinkle's first exposure to hip hop, only because his line about getting jiggy with it was there only to be dropped into the trailers.

6) I also appreciate that the film made the conscious choice to animate Rocky and Bullwinkle as cell-shaded objects, instead of trying to make 'realistic' CGI versions of the characters. Not only does it emphasize the nature of Jay Ward's animation style and the fact that they literally don't belong here, it gives the film a look that makes it stand out from other animated properties in live action features.

7) How many times do I have to say this? Every time you draw attention to a flaw in your script through dialogue, you're not proving you're clever--you're just reminding us that your script is flawed.

"You mean this isn't going to return us into pop culture
prominence?  Like Heck you say!"

8) How many times do I have to say this, part two? Just including a celebrity in a cameo isn't a joke. And just including a celebrity cameo so you can make a joke about how the character looks exactly like the celebrity who's playing him is even less of a joke.

9) I have to wonder if Kenan Thompson felt a chill run across his back when he was on set for the woefully unfunny extended cameo he did with his then-partner Kel Mitchell as the fatefully named Martin and Lewis, given he was about to play Fat Albert in a film scenario erieely like this one.

10) I do get the sense that this film tried to capture the same sense of satire the show had with the whole 'RBTV' plot...except that said satire doesn't quite work. Just putting on the same shows we usually watch circa 2000 only with black suited spies is not satire, it's lazy. That being said, I admit I found the clips from 'Three Wacky Spies On A Horse Who Is Also A Spy' weirdly charming in its bizarreness.

Overall...a high holy mess that--like so many of the 'family movies' these days--is so busy trying to prove how hip it is and appeal to everyone, it ends up appealing to no one. There is an effort here, but one so confused that what little that's good about this movie is quickly submerged.

Ten Statements About....BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997)

Boy, those attempts to make the NHL appeal to new
viewers have gotten...weird.

"In the universe, there is only one constant...everything freezes."

1) The best way--some would say the only way--to view this movie is by accepting that this is a film that has surrendered itself so totally to the marketing department that it has ceased to have any connection to character, place or reality. This film is not so much telling us a story but stringing a long succession of scenes together in the hope of getting us to buy stuff.

2) Poor George Clooney, cast at the last minute, is obviously overtired throughout the film, sporting a perpetual five o'clock shadow. Yes, he tries very hard to keep up his energy, but he fails to give us anything more than a Batman who seems to have hit the vicodin a lil' too hard. That being said....

3) His best moments, and the best moments in the film, are the ones between him and Michael Gough as Alfred. There's a genuine connection between the two, so much so that you believe wholeheartedly that this is not employer and employee, but father than son. It is the through line between the two that provides what little grounding this film has...at least until the whole 'Oh, noes, I gots da McGregor disease' development drops Alfred from the second half of the film.

In her off-time, Alicia Silverstone looks for an earlier
version of the script that actually makes sense while
pretending to have a stroke...

4) Here's something heretical--yes, Arnold Schwarzeneggar's incessant ice puns do detract from the movie, but there are some lines of dialogue that Mr. Freeze has that actually make sense and would have been effective if, you know, it wasn't being muttered by a guy with a thick Austrian accent who looks so much bigger than the Clooney Batman that he wouldn't need a suit of armor designed for a Broadway musical to beat his ass. It's those blink-and-you-miss-it brief moment that make me think that yes, at one point, there was a movie that would have been entertaining.

5) Movie, just because you can drag Vendela and Viveca A. Fox and Coolio into your orbit for a few moments in nothing roles doesn't mean you should have.

6) And while we're on the subject, movie...when Elizabeth Sanders' Gossip Gerty and the Neon Skull Gang have both more screen time and more lines of dialogue than Commisioner Gordon and Chief O'Hara, you're very severely flawed.

7) I'm absolutely convinced that of all the people involved in this movie, Uma Thurman was the only one who realized how far down a hole this film was falling and threw all caution to the wind. It's the only way I can explain how she chose to play Poison Ivy as Mae West.

8) You know what the problem is with Alicia Silverstone in this movie? It's that, as an actress, she seems incapable of being serious without doing these weird gurning movements with her face. Watching her emote as Barbara Gordon is like watching a claymation version of her; between the wiggling of her eyebrows and the chewing of her lips from side to side, she comes off as a grotesque.

"You know, in a previous incarnation, I was actually
articulate..."

9) Good job taking Bane, a character who is even more overtly the dark mirror of the Batman, someone whose intelligence and strength embody the nature to Batman's nuture, and turning him into a monosyllabic bull in a china shop.

No, wait. NO IT ISN'T.

10) That total lack of reality I cited in statement one extends to this version of Gotham, which simply is a city that Can Not Possibly Exist. There is no sense of place, just a bunch of crazy items (statues that hold buildings up miles over the street! Insane asylums that have cages up on bridges over the ocean! Factories that are condemned yet still have vats of non-decayed, still soft ice cream out in the open air!) that facilitates set pieces.

Overall...this is not the Worst Movie Ever. It's not even The Worst Superhero Movie Ever (anyone who lobs that charge at this film hasn't seen, among other things, Pumaman or Ghost Rider--yes, Munn, I said it). What it is is a gigantic mess of ulterior motives, bad decisions and miscues drawn together in what has to be a perfect storm of nonsense. Could be worth watching as an example of a franchise crashing down under its own weight.

Ten Statements About....DOCTOR WHO SEASON SIX, EPISODE THIRTEEN: THE WEDDING OF RIVER SONG (2011)

He wears a stetson now because...well, because it suits his
new direction.

"Something has happened to time. That's what you say, what you never stop saying. All of history is happening at once...but what does that mean? What happened? Explain to me in terms that I can understand. What happened to time?"

"A Woman."

1) Two minutes in and I don't know what has floored me the most--the sight of balloon assisted cars floating over London as a steam train emerges from that Faberge'-Egg looking building whose name I can never remember; seeing Simon Callow, who was so wonderful in 'The Unquiet Dead,' reprising his role as Charles Dickens on a TV chat show...or discovering that Moffat somehow got Meredith Viera to do a guest spot! Russell T. Davies made up an American television anchor--Moffat got the real thing!

2) You know...the stetson really suits Matt Smith's face, as does this version of the Doctor, who is something of a lone gunslinger tracking down the 'man' who's sworn to kill him before he himself is killed. I think he needs to keep the hat into season seven.

3) Cannibal skulls...ewwwwww....pretty gross idea even if we don't see the actual gore of them eating that guy.

4) Once again, just as in 'The Big Bang,' we see how Moffat uses props and visual cues gleaned from previous episodes this season to move the story along much quicker than it deserves to be...and considering how he looked further away from the end this season than last, those short cuts are welcome.

5) The moment where the passing of Nicholas Courtney was acknowledged--subtlety and kindly--blindsided me. A wonderful moment that recognizes how big a part this man, and his character, had in this series.

It's Amy..in an eyepatch..shooting a gun...
I want to marry this girl...

6) I love how Smith plays off of Ian McNeice's Churchill, and it's fitting that he becomes the 'companion' for this episode, as we know that in the real timeline he's aware of The Doctor's nature, and is smart enough to piece together what's going wrong.

7) Oh. My. God. I'm in love with James Bond Amy...sorry, Amelia....

8) Would people be pissed at me if I said I would love to see the Doctor having adventures on this weird Mish-Mash World? It just seems so unbearably cool.

9) The brilliance of the solution to the quandry of this season? It was right there out in the open. We just never considered it until it's waved right in front of our nose. This is why I will always prefer Moffat to Davies--Moffat understands that the satisfaction comes not from the surprise itself, but in the way we see behind the curtain when the surprise is sprung.

Just to remind you...this is pure nightmare fuel...

10) I like the implied new status quo of the show--with this, Moffat has managed to smoothly pull The Doctor away from the 'superhero and messiah for our age' mode that Russell T. Davies put him into and placed him firmly into the mode he was in the classic series...an enigma wandering the universe from the shadows, quietly operating as a universal spanner in the works of evil....I almost wish we see him operating on his own, or with some short-term companions ala' Tennant during the 'Specials Season' two years ago.

In short....after a shaky season with some even shakier individual episodes, Moffat once again ties things up neatly and with flair, answering some questions while leaving some open and, it is implied, giving this Doctor a new direction. Bravo, Mr. Moffat. Bravo.

Ten Statements About....SLAMMIN' SALMON (2009)

In some cultures, stuffing a fish down a man's throat is a
sign of friendship and respect...not here, of course...

"I am so sorry, but her soup face scared the shit out of me. My voice is not that high."

1) This is the first Broken Lizard film not directed by Jay Chandrasekhar--Kevin Heffernan helms this one--and there is a definite disconnect here, partially due to Heffernan suffering from First Director Anxiety. He throws in so many different fancy tricks and transitions that it sometimes distracts from what is usually the strength of a Broken Lizard film...namely the characters and the performances.

2) I am relieved that Michael Clarke Duncan, an actor I fear is slipping into R. Lee Ermy syndrome (you know what I mean...playing variations of the same character in perpetuity), actually gets to do something lighter than he usually does. I wouldn't say he has a talent for comedy, but his timing is really good and he comes off well...

3) For that matter, so does Lance Henrickson, of all people, who plays a funhouse mirror version of Dick Wolf and does show the kind of talent for comedy those of us who are fans of his always suspected he had in those rare moments of Season Two of Millenium.

4) Given that Jay Chandrasekhar has the biggest career of this group, and could insist on better treatment, I have to give him so much credit for being absolutely fearless in taking the most embarrassing roles for himself. I don't think he's gone through a film since Super Troopers where he hasn't had some form of extreme indignity thrust upon his person--you know, like being featured bare assed through large portions of this film....

"Now I want you to drop and give me twenty decent jokes...not
the crap you're spouting in this movie!"

5) I do wish that Erik Stolhanske had moved forward a lot earlier to play the bad guy. Granted, he's a douche from the start, but so are a number of characters, and given the film the Lizards chose to spoof in this film they needed a clearer cut villain to work against.

6) And speaking of the film this was designed to spoof...it's obvious fairly early on that Slammin' Salmon is supposed to be a comedic version of Glengarry Glen Ross...except that it gets lost in other things, like the increasingly gross mishaps that befall April Bowlby's Mia or Chandrasekhar's Nuts becoming 'Zongo' once he's off his meds, and loses its focus in the last forty minutes or so.

7) Another first time director mistake Heffernan makes is in making his own Rich into a central character--to the point where he has the major climatic beat when he stands up to Duncan's Cleo Salmon. It might explain why the film comes off as disjointed at times. Maybe if some of Rich's character traits, like his being married to Salmon's sister, were distributed to others, the film wouldn't seem so unbalanced.

Yep...'cause nothing says a good time at the movies than a
hot blonde with severe 1st degree burns...

8) I guess we can add Colbie Smolders to the list of actresses I actually find quite attractive and engaging as long she's not playing the role everyone knows her for...so you just get in line behind Olivia Wilde, dear....

9) You know, I wonder if the film would also have benefited from having many of its cameos discarded. I mean, I guess it's flattering that Viveca A. Fox or Morgan Fairchild or Jim Gaffigan wants to be in your movie...it doesn't necessarily mean you need to use them all in the same film and give them all storylines.

10) With that being said, I do like how Will Forte's little-longer-than-a-cameo story played out...prolly because it ties in directly to the resolution of the film's A plot.

Overall...this is not the worst Broken Lizard film--let's be honest, they could do a film about them crapping on paper plates and it'd still be better than the reprehensible Puddle Cruiser--but it is unfocused and meandering, tending to get more involved in its side stories than keeping its eye on the main tale. I still will watch anything this group will do, but it doesn't make me laugh as hard as Super Troopers or Beerfest.

Ten Statements About....YOU, AGAIN? (2010)

Yeah, I'd be crying if I was caught in Romcom Hell, too, Kristen...

1) Poor Kristin. Poor, poor Kristin. Although it's obvious she knows she needs out of this romcom spiral she's in judging from her campaigning to get a Veronica Mars movie going (and for the record, I did not pay for this--I used my free admittance slip from Machete).

2) This is one of those films that follows 'The Script' so closely that it doesn't bother to, you know, give any of these characters any character. Bell's Marti and Odette Yustman's Joanna seem to have jumped immediately from high school to the weekend this film takes in, and that's more than any of the other characters get.

3) This is also one of these films that is built on a co-incidence so back-breaking its not funny--okay, I could have accepted that Yustman and James Wolk's Will never met in high school...if he wasn't the star basketball player while she was the head cheerleader. There's no way they couldn't have met!

Betty White gloats over the face she has the best career
of all the people in this picture....

4) Two thing that just Aren't Funny Any More are Kids With Smart Mouths and Grannies With The Hots For Anything That Moves...and we get both! Thanks, Movie Gods!!!

5) I have never, ever seen a film so clearly demarcate its acts in a long time...to the point where you can see the exact moment when everyone has to stop acting like petulant madwomen and start bonding. And the way the script hewes so tightly to that three act structure produces a film where everyone, but everyone acts like a monster that until it's time for the message section of the film.

Dear Hollywood...this is how you cast people to be family members

6) It's really, really weird that Yustman and Sigourney Weaver's Ramona look more like mother and daughter than Bell and Jamie Lee Curtis' Gail...and Yustman and Weaver are supposed to be aunt and niece. The sad fact is that Bell's movie family looks exactly like a mismatched bunch of actors thrown together for name value.

7) It's also weird--although prolly their skills as actresses rather than the strength of the script or the characters provided them--that the film's message about how it's the sum of all your experiences that make you who you are, even the bad ones is driven home much, much better by Weaver and Curtis than by Bell and Yustman.

8) Oddly enough...the few moments of grace come from the smaller roles, especially the slightly-larger-than-a-cameo appearance of Dwayne Johnson as a federal marshall who gives Bell some good advice, and especially Kristen Chenoweth playing the too-fabulous wedding planner. On the other hand, Kyle Bornheimer's Tim is truly irritating, and the cameos by Patrick Duffy and Cloris Leachman are lazy and rely solely on the audience recognizing them as the actors and not the characters.

9) ...and speaking of lazy...this is one of those pictures where, when you see Kristin accidentally spills her lunch on Sean Wing's Charlie, you know that he is The Designated Love Interest--even when he has less than twenty minutes of screen time, and doesn't have a single scene of more than five lines with her.

A reminder...THIS is the only reason I saw this film...this,
and the fact that my free movie pass was expiring that weekend...

10) Boy, does John Oats look even goofier without the mustache.

In short--one of those bad, bad movies that walks The RomCom Script like a prom date trying to prove he's not drunk to a highway patrolman...and thus doesn't realize they've created unlikable, unsympathetic characters behaving like lunatics. But at least Kristin Bell looked cute in her Nike Dri-Fit top and sweatpants in Act Two (Not so much the sweats in Act Three that keep slouching around her hips)

Incidentally, the trailers were similarly terrible--the worst of which was Gnomeo and Juliet, a version of the Shakespeare classic played out by garden gnomes that was so hideously ill-conceived my mouth hung open, and yet another showing of that abominable looking Life As We Know It trailer that just reinforces how unappealing the two 'appealing' leads are, and does the trailer script of handing us a two to five minute summary of the film from beginning to end. I should prolly also mention Burlesque, a backstage melodrama that's being sold as a vehicle for Christina Aguilara and features Bell as her frenemy...but the sight of Cher's overtly-plasticed body still scares me.

Ten Statements About....PIRAHNA 3-D (2010)

They're coming to et you...

1) You have to give Alexandre Aja credit for thoroughly and completely understanding the Hitchcock rule about following through on expectations....so when there's some attention drawn to Riley Steele's Crystal's fake boob job, you know you'll be seeing those popped saline bags floating in a mess of bloody water. And when Jerry O'Connell's Derrick complains that the pirahnas ate his penis, well....

2) Aja also studied the rules of early 70's nature gone amok pictures, as so much of this film--from the plain yellow arial type that make up the earliest titles to the way the cameos echo back to previous roles the cameo-ing actors had to the formula where asshole get punished for their assholery and the non-asshole victims die acting heroically--speaks of a respect for the genre and the original film.

3) And to make things even more satisfying--Aja knows that this is a 3-D picture and revels in the carnival sideshow-ishness of it all. There are loads of 'coming at ya!' moments and deep focus shots, although I could have done without the direct-to-the-camera shot of Jessica Szohr's Kelly puking....

4) Look up Milf in my personal dictionary and there you'll find a picture of Elizabeth Shue...

5) You know....even though this is obviously a movie aimed at the younger crowd, it's refreshing to see that the heroes are mainly middle-aged.

Laugh while you can, Jerry O'Connell...something dear to you
is about to get et....

6) And similarly--by introducing the 'Girls Gone Wild' manque of O'Donnell and his pair of nymphs into the mix, it allows him to focus on the very realistically cute-without-being-Caucasin-Wankery-Network-sexy Szohr as the female lead

7) Eli Roth utilizing a garden hose as if it is his spurting cock and talking about wet t-shirts and breasts....some things can not be unseen....sigh

8) If there is any doubt about how lowbrow this film's intentions are, the seemingly endless 3-D sequence of Steele and Kelly Brook's Dani playing nude Esther Williams before they get chopped into little pirahna-shaped pieces puts it clearly on the metaphorical glass...

9) Pretty much the bulk of the carnage comes at the beginning of the third act, when the monster pirahnas come a'snacking on all the dumb teenagers. it's maybe a ten minute or so sequence...but damn if Greg Nicotero and company make the most of their time to shine....

You may have been a shark hunter, pal...but you're gon' get et...

10) A lot has been made about Richard Dreyfuss' cameo....but it pales in comparison to Christopher Lloyd and Dina Meyer as a couple of wackdoole fish store owners/scientists Mr. and Mrs. Goodman. When he pronounced these things as prehistoric pirahnas, a wave of knowing laughter rippled through the theater...

In short. Aja knows exactly what he needs to do to entertain us, and acquits himself admirably. It prolly will be forgotten the moment you leave the theater, but while you're there it'll just make you laugh and cringe at turns.

This was my first time at the Loews Kip's Bay in Manhattan since my college days; it seems that the $6-before-noon policy is good all over the city for AMC/Loews' theaters (It's the only way I'll see a 3D film, as the policy makes them the same price as a regular matiness elsewhere). It's got one of the friendliest staffs I've experienced in a while...but the prices for concessions--even the vending machines--are insane.

The trailers contained the usual one of Machete that never gets old, a pretty decent one for Faster that gives me hope that Dwayne Johnson got all that family crap out of his system, the guardedly promising Tron Legacy, two airings of Resident Evil: Aftermath 3-D in both flatscreen and 3-D, and the nightmare-inducing-for-all-the-wrong-reasons collaboration between M. Night Shamalyn and Jim Dowdel, Devil. Of course, the biggest nightmare came from watching the puff piece for You Again?, in which Kristen Bell's tormentor from high school is marrying her brother (and what's more, her mom's tormentor is her tormentor's aunt, and they only discovered this juuuuuust now...it's as if Bell has decided she never wants to make another film that won't make me throw up again...