Wednesday, October 21, 2009

I'm a Good Dancer

A few weeks ago, my wife Megan and I were at a friend's wedding. We had some drinks and did some dancing. I think of myself as someone who is not a good dancer. According to an email I just got, after reviewing her video footage, the bride agreed:

"I can see you dancing and it makes me think that the dj is horrible. You have this way of moving that looks like, 'Why are we dancing to Footloose? Oh well. I am going to make the best of it and swing my arms from side to side because Megan told me to act like I'm having a good time.' - The idea of you being forced to dance to Footloose makes me happy. Oh, also, my mom loves my breasts."

My dancing was so bad that she thought the DJ had to be responsible. Because no person could move themselves in such a way without help. As if better music would somehow transform me into Usher. Or even someone who isn't tone deaf.

I have "this way of moving..." It's not even really dancing. Just "moving." Almost like it's independent of the music. I'm just moving around and there happens to be dance music playing concurrently. Purely coincidence. Unrelated.

I don't know what to say about that last line. I don't know what it means or how I was supposed to respond. It does make me wonder if that's normal. Surely it would be weird if her dad loved her breasts. I wonder if my dad loves my dick. I assume not. And I have no intentions of finding out. Do parents talk to each other about how attractive/unattractive their kids are? I guess they have to. I know we would.

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Saturday, October 17, 2009

The 11 Worst Movies I Saw In a Theater

I present to you the eleven worst movies I - at 30 years old - have seen in a theater. Some of these are probably tainted by expectations. When you think something will be good and it's bad, it always seems worse than it is. If Shakira was terrible in bed, you'd be more disappointed than if Whoopi Goldberg was. Why eleven? I couldn't leave any off.

That all being said, not all eleven of these came with the weight of great expectations. One I even saw for free. But I don't see everything, so what you see here is the very worst of what I thought wouldn't be bad.

These are the movies that made me want to grab the director and stars and shake them. I had to know what the hell they were thinking, and what in the world had convinced them that these were good ideas. And how did they convince me to leave my house and come see their trash?


#11

The Lost World: Jurrassic Park (1997)

First, let me explain. When I was little, I loved dinosaurs. Probably too much. I had a dinosaur poster and all the of dinosaur figures - the ones to scale, obviously. Jurrassic Park, the book was immediately then and still is now my favorite book reading experience.

The movie premiered on the night of my school's senior prom. Surprisingly and unexpectedly, this became a problem for me. However, as luck would have it, a SONY Theater location near me was showing sneak peaks on Thursday night. I bought tickets for me and 7 friends literally a month in advance. You see now, the problem with expectations. For the most part, the movie delivered what it promised: Plenty of rampaging dinosaurs and great special effects. But then why did we all walk out of the theater confused and feeling awful?

The answer is simple. The Lost World: Jurrassic Park contains within it the single worst idea for a scene in an action/adventure movie ever conceived. EVER. I've seen every Michael Bay movie, every Bruce Willis movie. Hell, I've seen every Dolph Lundren movie and I've never seen a single scene destroy a movie like this one. We all know what it is. Jeff Goldblum inexplicably has a 13 year old black daughter. She tags along uninvited onto the island. We learn that she was recently cut from her gymnastics team. Did anybody go to a high school with a gymnastics team? I went to a private school in NJ that had a fucking Ski Team but we didn't have gymnastics. Anyway, as she and her dad are being chased by Velociraptors, girlie here jumps onto some perfectly placed pipes and does a flawless uneven bar routine culminating with her kicking a 300lb velociraptor out a window to its death. The moment this happens, the life goes out of the theater and Goldblum's attempt at humor "They cut you from the team?" goes laughless. Why? Because they'd spent two movies telling us what great hunters Raptors are how they smart they are. Apparently, they should have been writing this movie.

I still remember being in that theater and staring blankly ahead. I don't know for how long, but I wasn't the only one. Towards the end, when a T-Rex is rampaging through a city my friend leaned over and said "Dude, did a thirteen year old girl really just kill a Raptor?" Yeah, she sure did.

I've still only seen this movie once. I can't bare to watch it again.

#10

The History Boys (2006)

This little seen (thankfully) British import is one of the most inexplicable movies I've ever seen. It's about an all boys school (as is another on my list) and centers around the students' attempts to gain admission to Oxford or Caimbridge. That would be dull enough, but large parts of the film deal with one of the teachers who likes to fondle the boys, and gives them rides home on his mo-ped while molesting them. This is taken very lightly, and in fact, played for some laughs.

The movie's horrible third act presents the viewer with the chance the molesting teacher could be fired for these offenses, or forced into early retirement. And it treats the matter as a tragedy. This teacher is portrayed as a hero to the boys, like a fatter, handsy-er Robin Williams from Dead Poets Society. In fact, the movie ends with this teacher riding off into the sunset with one character he's always wanted to fondle.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?


#9

Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)


This movie holds a special place in my heart because it almost singlehandedly ended a friendship. I wanted to see this movie and I convinced my friend Kaushal to come along despite his lengthy and sensible objections. If you've seen this movie, you know the premise: On this island, Dr. Moreau (played by a mumu wearing Marlon Brando) conducts DNA experiments turning animals and humans into hybrids or some such nonsense.

You learn quickly that there is only 1 interesting character in the movie and so naturally that character is killed off 30 minutes in. The audience constantly laughed at the movie's attempts to be serious. My buddy fell asleep and when he woke up, Val Kilmer was having drug induced sex with some kind of Cheetah-woman. Kaushal wouldn't go to the movies with me for a year. And I didn't even bother to fight him on it.



#8
Four Christmases (2008)

Okay, Vince Vaughn, we get your shtick. And the fact that you have absolutely zero intention of doing anything different. We as movie goers are very forgiving. We can forgive a single bad movie, or unfunny comedy or playing the same character in every movie (that's you too, Michael Cera), but what's hard to forgive are 3 giant turd shaped "family comedies" in row that aren't the least bit funny from a guy who used to be funny, but now rambles on maniacally begging for laughs as he plays the same self-centered asshole over and over again. Fred Claus, this monstrosity and Couples Retreat are strikes 1-2-3 for Vaughn. (he gets a pass for The Break Up because I like looking at Jennifer Aniston.) There's only one funny moment in the nearly 6 hours of screentime in these three combined and that comes from Reese Witherspoon talking about how she used to "play sunbathing" in high school with a girl she was convinced wasn't a lesbian.

These are the safest and most contrived movies you could imagine. There is not one moment on screen where you find yourself thinking "I didn't expect that to happen." Four Christmases is by the far the worst offender. Not only does it insist on dragging out slapsticky scenarios desperately searching for something funny (falling off a roof was funny for Chevy Chase 10 years ago, it's not funny now) but then, when it realizes that it has absolutely nowhere to go, it simply changes it's characters to suit the story and then has good old reliable John Voight waltz on screen and explain to explain the moral of the movie: how important family is.

Here's the pitch for a Vince Vaughn movie as it would go down in a meeting:

"We've got a guy, who's a selfish wise-ass, but he's finally going to grow up and learn how important his family or relationship really is."

They've now made that movie 4 times. And people keep seeing it.

Four Christmases takes a great premise and mines absolutely nothing from it. The nicest thing I've heard anybody say about it is "it was kind of cute." But it isn't cute at all.



#7

Holy Man (1998)

Eddie Murphy has made his share of crap. He, along with John Travolta and many others doesn't seem to know how to say "no" to a paycheck. You have to learn to be able to tell when an actor just wanted some money (Judi Dench in The Chronicles of Riddick) and when the material might actually be good. Holy Man is the former. Murphy plays some kind of spiritual guru who becomes a home shopping sensation. Boy, what a great idea. Unfortunately, this is not the last time screenwriter Tom Schulman will be heard from on this list.

Luckily for Murphy, his part in Holy Man is essentially as a supporting actor. The most screen time is reserved for Jeff Goldblum who will drive to within an inch of killing yourself with his non-stop whining. He basically plays a 6 foot tall 8 year old girl. The only time you don't hear him whining or complaining - like a slow talking Vince Vaughn - is when Robert Loggia is screaming as if he were in a politica thriller and not a laughless comedy about home shopping. This movie is awful and my poor wife-to-be had to see it twice opening weekend. How she's still alive is beyond me.


#6

At First Sight (1999)

A movie about a blind guy who falls in love with a woman, gets an eye transplant and then has a breakdown. The movie stars Val Kilmer - the one time "cool" actor from True Romance and Tombstone and Mira Sorvino - an oscar winner who was kind of hot - and drew from these two actors what have to be worst performances of the careers. And I say that knowing full well that Sorvino went on to star in movies like Mimic and The Replacement Killers. Val Kilmer appears to believe that all blind people are also retarded. There's an ice skating scene here that will make you want to kill yourself. As will almost every single line Kilmer says while blind, trying to sound like he's ten times smarter than everyone else.

"Close your eyes. Listen with your whole body." Oh yeah, it's like that.

The movie is essentially a Lifetime original movie that should have starred actors from old sitcoms. Think Sara Gilbert and Tim Daly or Melissa Gilbert and Tom Selleck. There are even natural pauses where commercials for laxatives, tampons and personal massagers can fit right in. When Val Kilmer first "sees" Mira Sorvino and says "So this is what beautiful looks like" I challenge anybody not to laugh or vomit.


#5

The Mist (2007)

Directed by Frank Darabont from the work of Steven King.... That phrase once brought us The Shawshank Redemption, one of the most universally beloved movies of all time. And then The Green Mile, a solid prison movie that made Darabont 2-2 with Oscar Nominees.

The movie is about New England townspeople trapped in a grocery store as a mysterious and eventually deadly mist covers their town (and maybe the world?). What it's really about though is people turning on each other when pushed too far. Or after 2 hours of a movie, how a director turns on his own characters and then the audience.

The Mist could easily be a Sci-Fi channel movie. The creaturs that come out of the mist to kill and eat people are not scary. They look ridiculous. The special effects are just above what you would find in a movie like "Boa vs. Python" or "Island of the Kamodo Dragons." This movie is long and gory and you wonder why until the end. There, sitting a car are the 5 people in the movie you care about the most. A father and son, an elderly couple and single woman. The movie has shown these five to be among the smartest and most reasonable. They don't think the mist is the end of days and they don't clamour for a human sacrifice. They see the terror and the violence and gore and the horror all around them and when their car runs out of gas on the highway, still engulfed in mist and having passed shopping mall sized monsters, they know they're doomed.

So they agree, and without wasting any time, our hero - played by the likable Thomas Jane - takes the four remaining bullets in their gun and executes his 4 fellow passengers - including his own 5 year old son. He gets out of the car and waits for death to come. He hears a rumbling, and out of the Mist comes... the military, who have retaken the area, killing all the monsters. Still covered in blood, Jane falls to the ground wailing with despair.

(Personally, I wouldn't shoot myself or anybody else until I was mere inches away from some horrible death. Not just on the likelihood that such a death was coming. But that's why Darabont goes out of his way to show you the horrors these people were facing. But still...)

You can tell by overly serious score that Darabont thought he was making a serious movie. A classic. But he wasn't. And nobody told him. To put it into perspective, a friend of mine claimed it was "worse than Bicentennial Man."

#4

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Don't bother trying to tell me that you love it. I hate this movie. And I hate that people think they love it. I know a lot of people who say they do, but none who've seen it in the last 10 years. I hate this movie so much. Sometimes, in the theater, you can feel yourself being manipulated by a movie. A more recent example would something like "Pay It Forward" or even "Marley and Me." But really, no movie makes me angrier than Dead Poets Society. An equal combination of unbelievable pretentiousness and unrealistic absurdity. No movie has more characters acting impossibly with the gears of storyteling more obvious. Each scene may as well come with instructions that tell the viewer how they are supposed to feel. It couldn't be more obvious and insulting.

Find me one person who spent his high school nights in a cave with his guy friends reading poetry to each other. And don't tell me it's the 1950's and things were different. They weren't that different. The parents of the students aren't even characters, just caricatures of caricatures. Overly melodramatic, and full of pompous scenes that want the audience to say outloud "That's right, you break those rules!"

This movie won writer Tom Schulman an Academy Award. Good for him. But Tom's remaining career highlights include "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," "What About Bob?" "Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag" and "Welcome to Mooseport." Granted, that's four more movies than I've gotten made, but still not the best company to keep.


#3

Batman and Robin (1997)

I'll admit it: I like George Clooney. I don't blame him at all for this. If someone offered me $5mil to play Batman, I'd take in a heartbeat. I might not even notice that my costume had silver nipples, that large portions of the script featured Chris O'Donnell and Alicia Silverstone, that every set would be more brightly colored than Japanese Anime, that a scene required Batman to attend an event and dance in public, that Arnold Schwartzenegger was playing a doctor or that the script included lines like:

  • "It's the hockey team from hell."
  • "Everybody Chill!"
  • "Ice to meet you."
  • "You're just jealous because Poison Ivy loves me."
  • "Kill the heroes."

This movie was a complete mess. I don't know how a director could put his name on it. I don't know what Shumaker was paid, but it couldn't have been worth it. The whole movie was like one big toy commercial and an insult to anybody who ever read a single Batman comic. Actually, to anybody smart enough to read any book. It made the old TV show with Adam West look moody and intense. Try to watch the trailer without laughing.

It didn't make sense to me until a week or so later when I was running a tennis clinic for kids. A 7 year old was on my court wearing Batman and Robin sneakers. Suddenly, it all made sense.



#2
Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (1999)

"There's always a bigger fish."

I'll say up front that I was never a big Star Wars guy. Episode IV is fine and V is a great movie. But VI was boring and basically IV again but with little bears. That's just my opinion. I know other people love it and that's fine with me. I'm just not one of them. What nobody loves, though, is this movie, which is not only terrible, but might feature the single least likable, most ridiculous, dumbest, most annoying and to many even most offensive character imaginable.

(I was in high school when this came out. A friend of mine tried to convince me it was great. That she loved it. "Amazing" she said. When I ask her about it now, she completely denies this ever happened.)


For every fan of Star Wars this movie was the ultimate meeting of expectation vs reality. The equivalent of Bar Rafaeli agreeing to have sex with you and then finding out she has a penis. Maybe even 2 penises. A good friend of mine is a huge Star Wars fan and he likened his experience watching Episode 1 to someone just punching him the balls for 2 straight hours without stopping. I went in without those expectations and was shocked at how bad it was. So I can't imagine how he felt. But I do know that because George Lucas refused to hire any other writers or a good director, my friend had that same feeling 2 more times.


#1
Spiderman 3 (2007)

It's not really even that close. This movie was just flat out awful. It had the misfortune of following a good sequel, which makes it look even worse. If that were possible. This is the only movie I've ever had to turn away from because what was on screen was so terrible and embarrassing that it hurt to look. And that happened more than once.

The first was while Kirsten Dunst and James Franco cooked and decided to dance to the twist. Watch that scene. Watch it. I dare you. You'll feel sick. It's awful. And it keeps going.

Next came Peter Parker's dark side. His cool side. His angry side. Or in Sam Raimi's mind, the side that wears eye liner, winks at girls and swing dances. I was staring at the floor. I looked over to my wife and she was doing the same thing. "I can't watch this," she said. This stuff was in a $200mil hollywood movie. People had to sign off on this. Give it the okay. Somebody watched Dailies with Sam Raimi and told him it looked good. Executives watch the cut of the movie and agreed to release it. I'd ask how, but why bother.

Let's also not forget the villainous Sandman, having just been proven more or less unbeatable, suddenly deciding that he doesn't want to fight anymore and will leave peacefully without having accomplished his goal of getting money for his daughter's medical bills. My wife and actually laughed our way out of the theater after this. I've read a lot of other opinions from "it's not that bad" to "There were just too many villains." Shit like that is letting Mr. Raimi off the hook. He laid an egg. But he's a good filmmaker and we'll forgive him for it. Not that he'd ask or even cares if we do.



THE END


So there it is. It was hard to make this list without using Juno, but somehow it came in at #12. Just after Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I also have a hard time not using National Treasure: Book of Secrets. I cant recommend strongly enough that nobody watch these movies. But if you must, you must. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a movie on the Sci-Fi channel about fish that come out of the water and kill people. I plan on checking that out.















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Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Scenes From a Marriage: Vol. 6

Wife said to me: "If you die because you didn't see Shakira, I'm not coming to your funeral."

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