Madea Goes to Jail (2009)

For this entry, I'd simply like to post the exact notes I took in the theater while we witnessed this horrifying display of closeted homosexuality and bad writing:

HERE IS WHAT HAPPENS IN MADEA GOES TO JAIL, THE MOVIE:

A crack ho is violently beaten and gang raped. She wakes up with a pimp's dick inside her, and he tells her, "You're my slave now, and slaves have to buy their freedom." So the sobbing bloody crack ho escapes through the window and flees down the street, totally naked except for a towel.

So basically, all this disturbing shit happens and then Tyler Perry shows up dressed up as a big fat woman and sprays machine gun fire in a crowded party while people scream and run away, and it's supposed to be funny.

Also, HERE IS WHAT HAPPENS IN "MADEA GOES TO JAIL," THE PLAY (because we've studied it extensively as well):

Madea and Miss Ella are babysitting for Vanessa. Sonny and Nathaniel are prison wardens. Sonny married Vanessa, but Cheryl Pepsii comes along and makes him realize that Vanessa is a conniving businesswoman who drowns their baby. Meanwhile, another lady gets out of jail and sings at her daughter that she wants to be a good mother now.

Now, I'm pretty confused right now, but I'm POSITIVE that NONE of this is happening in this movie. So why is it called "Madea Goes to Jail" when it isn't Madea Goes to Jail.

In fact, we've seen an embarrassing number of Tyler Perry plays and movies and the movie versions are NEVER, EVER even remotely similar to the plays. So Tyler Perry's writing is so generic that even he can't tell any of this crap apart. On the other hand, let me also say that this movie is not nearly as bad as Madea's Family Reunion or The Family That Preys.

Actually, as Tyler Perry becomes more and more obsessed with being in drag all the time (including Photoshopped pictures of Tyler Perry as a nude showgirl, blechh), Madea herself is the least terrible part of the movie, until you remember that Tyler Perry actually thinks he's different than RuPaul. Oh wait, Tyler Perry is nothing like RuPaul because RuPaul is AWESOME.

And if you've never seen anything by Tyler Perry and you can't believe how much we know about his work, just do a bunch of shots and go see Madea Goes to Jail because you won't believe your fucking eyes.

A Good Year (2006)

You may or may not be a Russell Crowe fan (I'm mostly not), but here is something interesting to learn -- although he has mastered an American accent with no problem, he absolutely CANNOT do an English accent. Isn't that strange?

In A Good Year, let's just face it and say that Crowe plays Hugh Grant, as a stuffy businessman who finds himself spending a year (a good year) at a charming, photogenically sun-dappled vineyard in the French countryside, for some reason or another. The point is, he's there to learn about himself, try to grow grapes, and fall in love with a small-town French babe (Marion Cotillard) who, I don't know, teaches him more stuff about himself. I promise I finished this movie.

I can appreciate what Crowe and Ridley Scott were trying to do here. They were trying to take a tired old formula and make it all smartsy to prove that light entertainment can still be quality entertainment. And how can you go wrong with a bunch of Oscar nominees, and an attractive location anyone would want to spend a year (a good year) in?

Well, you can start with Crowe's performance. He is a lot of things, but he is not charming. And he's DEFINITELY not funny. Again, why does his English accent suck so much? Shouldn't it be really easy for him because he's Australian? Just kidding. But he should still be better at it because he's supposed to be a good actor.

And I can't really think of anything else to say except, don't bother.

Big Momma's House 2 (2006)

I have a few things to say about Big Momma's House 2.

1) Forgive me for not bothering to see the original Big Momma's House first. I'm sure that wasn't fair to Martin Lawrence's artistic vision for the "Big Momma's House" series.

2) I will gladly give Martin Lawrence credit for one thing: while he is one of THREE (!) black comics who has resorted to dressing up as a morbidly obsese grandma to sustain his film career, AT LEAST he is playing a man undercover as a woman, and not playing an actual female -- as Eddie Murphy and Tyler Perry are so fond of doing themselves. Believe me, I have nothing against drag, but at least Big Momma's House 2 didn't make me feel like I was watching the creepy home movies of a schizophrenic closet transgender case who, on top of all that, IS NOT FUNNY.

3) No, Martin Lawrence isn't very funny either, but still.

4) Big Momma spends a lot of time in mid-air in this movie. Curious!

5) I will probably never see the original Big Momma's House. But I kind of recommend slow rolling the sequel.

Untraceable (2008)

About six years too late to scare anyone, the latest movie about a killer website stars Diane Lane as an FBI agent investigating a site where people log on to watch someone die, and the more people log on, the faster they die. So, you know, this is totally a statement about the dangers of voyeurism in the Internet Age. Or it would be, if this wasn't the stupidest idea for a movie since 88 Minutes.

You can tell this movie means business because it kills a kitten in an opening scene. Then you know it means business because Diane Lane and Colin Hanks sit around talking about "computar" and "intarnets" for a while, so you trust that if this killer website WAS traceable, they could find it. BUT THEY CAN'T BECAUSE IT'S UNTRACEABLE.

However, the single funniest thing about this movie is the rising visitor count on the killer website: it's, like, in the millions. And it quickly skyrockets into the TENS of millions. How quickly? Like, in a few minutes. AND it's restricted to American users only, so just think about what a huge chunk of the population that is. If that many people are SOOOOO into watching internet murder, we have a whole different problem on our hands than one murderer. If this website's hit counter gets more hits than CNN.com, this country needs to be nuked off the face of the planet. Our remains need to be UNTRACEABLE.

But if any of this sounds like Untraceable is effective as a statement about the decaying morals of our society in the Internet Age, well, it doesn't work because the actual issue of the people visiting the website is never addressed. We never meet an actual user of the killer website, so the only suspense is meant to come from the endless extreme closeups of a digital counter. SCAAARY! SO MANY INTARNET HITS OMG!

If you're particularly into bad thrillers like I am, check this one out. For the rest of you, it might be a little boring. Recommended.

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2008)

Can anyone believe Uwe Boll is still allowed to make movies anymore? AND that he gets semi-famous performers like Ray Liotta, Jason Statham, Ron Perlman, Matthew Lillard, Burt Reynolds, Claire Forlani, John Rhys-Davies, and LEELEE SOBIESKI to be in them? With such a bizarre cast, In the Name of the King plays like an embarrassing dress-up edition of The Surreal Life. But Matthew Lillard is the best of all, overacting with such zeal that Burt Reynolds looks visibly weirded out. And you know they only got one take, so they had to use it.

88 Minutes (2008)

I've seen a lot of bad thrillers, and I've loved a lot of bad thrillers... but I have never loved a bad thriller as much as I love 88 Minutes (although Twisted comes close). It's hilarious from start to finish, from the moment Al Pacino's raggedy wig is introduced, to the moment Leelee Sobieski tries acting like a "bad girl." And believe me, that last one was doomed from the word "acting."

This movie really serves it up Slow Roll-style by setting its opening scene in 1997 -- and hammering this home by (a) including extreme close ups of a newspaper covering Princess Diana's death in 1997, (b) having two Japanese lesbian sisters briefly discuss Princess Diana's death in 1997, and (c) blasting Backstreet Boys music from 1997. BECAUSE IT'S 1997.

Then there is a weird courtroom scene that, if anything is to be gathered from the editing, takes place on a sea-plane and lasts nine whole years. Then there is Al Pacino waking up in bed with a naked college girl lifting her leg over her head and looking at her vagina in the mirror. What on earth is going on? you may ask yourself at this point. And the answer would be, ONE OF THE GREATEST BAD MOVIES OF ALL TIME.

Without going into too much more detail, the plot is as follows: Al Pacino gets a mysterious phone call saying he has 88 minutes to live. He spends the rest of the movie trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, which is kind what the audience does as well. There's Amy Brenneman, whose sole character trait is being a huge lesbian. And of course, there is Leelee Sobieski reminding us that she still alive but not shedding any light on why she pronounces words as if English is her second language.

I could go on for 88 minutes about how much I love this movie, but you should really rent it for yourself. 88 times. STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.

Lady in the Water (2006)

Every writer finds themselves dreaming they can change the world with their pen, but 99% of the time, you've failed the second you try. Something changes. Your subject, your approach, your execution, and your attitude all become inescapably stupid. What could be worse than that? When you know you should know better, so you obscure your intentions a little bit, not enough to fog up your message, but enough to show people you're a little humble. Gosh! Look at you. You can be simple, just like the crowd!

This movie is about a landlord named Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) who is visited by a lady from the pool named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard). Story comes from the Blue World, which is in jeopardy or something, probably because the Blue World is Shyamalan's surrogate for his own creativity, or maybe it isn't really in jeopardy at all... it's hard to tell, but creatures want to kill Story and we're upset because she's the story. Story has come to inspire someone from our reality to write the next great work of art that will inspire someone else to become president and change the world, and together with a building full of archetypes, it's up to Cleveland to protect her until she succeeds.

Will she survive? Do you care? With its endlessly petulant self-reference (monsters want to kill the story!), the single movie with which Lady in the Water has the most in common is I Really Hate My Job. Worse, the single filmmaker with which this version of M. Night Shyamalan has most in common is Tyler Perry. They both fancy themselves knowing better than you, and so structure their bad films around lessons, so that not only are they teaching you to be a better person, you should also be grateful the medicine goes down easy. It's such a nauseating abuse of power, it's no wonder that anyone with a brain immediately hates it.

There are useless fantasy creatures that are introduced ("narfs," "scrunts," "tartutics"), useless sources for its own mythology (a dotty old Korean woman, via a Korean giantess), and useless right-angle turns in the narrative, including a fakeout as to who will change the world, and a fakeout as to who the great writer is (hint: it's Shyamalan). It's no surprise that the pieces never come together: the pieces are made of bullshit.

Shyamalan is a filmmaker acutely aware that he is gifted, but here, incredibly mistaken as to what those gifts are. He is an expert at summoning feeling out of the creepy, and when you're in Shyamalan's world, this might as well cover the entire spectrum of the human condition. His films are so rich, it is evident that he can tackle many genres besides the few he gives himself. But he is mistaken to think audiences want to look at any old thing bouncing around in his head. They don't.

Here's the problem: Story, Cleveland, and everyone else are too idiosyncratic to Shyamalan to be useful to anyone else. They're momentary fizzles every writer has all the time.

When you want to change the world, it helps to bring people onto your side of the pen.

Legacy (2008)

Is it fair to criticize a movie so scrappy, it's an accomplishment that it attains feature-length status at all? Sometimes a movie can't help betraying its low-budget roots, but every once in a while a movie shows up to the party already wasted just to cuss everybody out. It's just so awkward and nasty, you can't help but wonder how many inches away it is from doing porn.

Haylie Duff stars in this movie that looks and sounds just like porn without the sex. Well, most of the sex. There's a really disturbing scene where Haylie and her stoner boyfriend have sex, and the stoner guy videotapes it to show all his friends. Upon seeing it, the other guys cheer and applaud even though this footage is just the guy, shoulders up, pumping away. What you take from this is up to you. You can bet it was unintentional.

Which is so weird, because the tone this movie strikes requires such a careful modulation of details like that. It's supposed to be a nasty, "Jawbreaker"-esque murder satire with just enough taboo sexy meanness from hot young girls to make every frame just so, incredibly, delicious. And yet... hard.. Like... a Jawbreaker. You see, Haylie Duff runs the strictest bubblegum sorority to ever occupy a porn set in the San Fernando Valley, and she's not about to let a fat pledge ruin it even if she's the daughter of a former sorority mom. Mom will flex her money to make sure her fat daughter stays, and surprise surprise, the first party they throw sees the fat girl dead from a mysterious beating. Uh--oh! Cue the plinky strings on the soundtrack. Delicious.

First, this movie acts like it's a closely observed real-time dissection of What Went Wrong That Night. Then, it decides to do a Rashomon (link to "Basic" page) with all the girls stammering in separate interrogation rooms (allowing for all manner of delicious intercutting) while Haylie Duff vamps it up like a bad 40. Then, they go home and the killer chases them around with a knife. It's hard to say how it ends, but with such an explosive payoff to such an expert buildup, it would be a lie to say the whole diabolical confection wasn't completely... delicious.

Unaccompanied Minors (2006)

It was adapted from a story originally told on NPR's This American Life. It was directed by the creator of Freaks and Geeks, who has also directed episodes of zeitgeisty TV shows including "Arrested Development," "30 Rock," "Mad Men," and "Weeds." And since said director, the great Paul Feig, is also a co-executive producer of "The Office," Unaccompanied Minors features cameos from Mindy Kaling and BJ Novak, along with "Arrested Development" alum Jessica Walter and, like, half the cast of "The Daily Show."

But for all its pedigree, Unaccompanied Minors is made even worse by the amount of talent wasted on it. In fact, if I didn't know who Paul Feig was, I would think Unaccompanied Minors was just another lame, lazy, soulless, depressing movie about the holidays. Lewis Black, the actual worst thing that has even happened to "The Daily Show" (yes, this includes Dan Bakkedahl) stars as the head of an airport where a group of unsupervised children are trapped on Christmas. This is one of those movies where the adults are unnecessarily mean because they're adults and the kids are unnecessarily rowdy because they're kids. Horrible hijinks ensue.

Spanglish (2004)

Do you want to see a movie that's just going to make you mad? Then give a second glance to Spanglish, in which Tea Leoni gives a loud, shrill performance as a woman consumed by white liberal guilt. Said guilt causes her to befriend her maid and get her maid's daughter a scholarship to an expensive private school against said maid's wishes, and we are asked to invest in The Problems Of Rich White People for a staggering 131 minutes.

Three-time Oscar winner James L. Brooks may be a gifted writer and producer, but his five career directing credits require further scrutiny. All three of his Academy Awards came from his directorial debut Terms of Endearment, and he also helmed 1987's amazingly awesome Broadcast News. But then he presided over I'll Do Anything, followed by the film that supposedly cemented him as a visionary director: the execrable As Good as it Gets. And detractors of that movie already know what's wrong with Spanglish: that is, its characters are overblown caricatures who inhabit a world even more annoying than our own. Stop screaming, Tea Leoni. And I haven't even started talking about Adam Sandler.

Righteous Kill (2008)

At some point, director Jon Avnet must have thought that 2008 was going to be his year. He had worked with Al Pacino twice, and one of those times ol' Bobby DeNiro even showed up to lend a hand as well. After what was to be the triumph of 88 Minutes, his follow-up film, Righteous Kill, would cement Avnet as a serious director who knows how to handle great talent. Cinema buffs would celebrate the thrilling reunion between two actors who hadn't collaborated since 1995.

But instead of Heat 2: Even Hotter, Avnet's Righteous Kill turned out more like 89 Minutes: Not Another Minute. The only good thing one can find to say about this muddy cop thriller is that it wasn't Jon Avnet's worst movie starring Al Pacino, because 88 Minutes is much, much worse. And exponentially more hilarious.

Mission to Mars (2000)

This movie makes the origin of life on Earth boring. Like, so boring it has to spice up the journey with geriatric ballroom dancing in space. Wait, that makes it sound exciting. How about a meteorite assault and the subsequent deep-space abandonment of the ship, all shot with the intensity of a turtle knitting on valium? Sorry, now I'm making it sound too intense.

It's about a group of astronauts that takes the first human steps on Mars, and the rescue mission to uncover how it was all ruined by a bloodthirsty towering sand tornado penis. Now, that's already too many layers for this story. Shouldn't the discovery of a sand penis be more amazing than anything humanity has ever discovered before? Why do we need a rescue mission to waste precious time with twice as many characters as we need? What does the titular mission to Mars have to do with the mystery of the giant sand penis at all, even on the broadest, most intuitive level? That sand penis should be all anyone talks about!

Tim Robbins is in this, looking exactly as male as actress Connie Nielsen. They are precisely as male and female as each other. It is very weird. They play the happy astronaut couple that causes widower Gary Sinise to steal away to his space bunk all the time to watch home videos of his dead wife that look like they were shot on a $50 million budget.

They are all part of a rescue mission to save Don Cheadle from the giant sand penis on Mars, but what they don't know is that the sand penis was hiding a giant face. And inside the face is the secret to the origin of our species.

The secret? Tyra Banks shot her Martian DNA into Earth's oceans and we showed up by complete coincidence.

THE END.

I told you we should have spent more time with the penis.

Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006)

You don't expect a movie like this to be any good, but sometimes they surprise you by being even worse. Nobody asked for a sequel to "Garfield: The Movie." Nobody even asked for "Garfield: The Movie." Nobody asked for homosexual jealousy between man and beast. And nobody, I mean NOBODY, asked for Jon and Liz to get together! I mean they were sooo much better when Liz was being a giant bitch. It's like: Jon, you'll win her over, we promise!

Bill Murray returns as the voice of Garfield, as well as Garfield's doppelganger from the United Kingdom, who get switched for some reason involving Liz's international veterinarian conference. It's not that important. It also most likely inconveniences a bunch of people who have important jobs to do, like go to vet conferences on the other side of the world, and it's a mark of today's movies for kids that we even have to discuss important vet conferences that nobody cares about just to get to the dumb cat hijinks. Shouldn't you build a story around something at least a little bit more interesting to kids? That's nothing to say about Jon traveling to Europe to propose to Liz and SNOOOOOOOOZE. God, this movie sucks.

Anyways, Garfield calls Jon a "queen" to Odie, sabotages his proposal to Liz, and dances all sexy for him. This is not even subtext, it is the actual text -- Garfield is in love with Jon. There's some barn-animal activism as well, and at one point the British Garfield gets soaked in poop from a sewer. Then it is implied that a blood-splattered Garfield has just eaten a pie with a human inside it. Oh, and Garfield eats 10,000 plates of non-cartoon food in a scene that gives one actual vertigo for all the laws of nature it shatters. Just try to imagine what kind of biology it would require to consume 10,000 plates of food at once, leaving only bones.

We paused it when Garfield gets stuck in the front door of a miniature castle and farts from all the pressure. It is a good point to stop and reassess your life. If you have nothing to live for, please enjoy the second half of this film.

Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

What can you even say about this movie? It's just really bad. The worst part is that it so wants to be better than your typical C-grade monster (C-monster?) movie, but its more pretentious ambitions damn it even more. You see, the fourth (!) entry in the Jaws series has real family issues in it. You know, jealousy issues between mother and son, acceptance issues for mom's new boyfriend, forgetting to take out the trash issues leading to explosive fight issues between young husband and wife issues... I mean, so many issues. So it tends to break the already weak tension when the shark -- there's a shark! -- attacks all these people with their incredibly annoying issues, because obviously he's watching this movie too and wants it to stop.

So, is Jaws: The Revenge a closely-observed drama that explores family intimacy with a precision that turns the mundane into something riveting? Or, is it a monster movie starring a shark made out of a matchbox? It's hard to say, because it is neither. The family issues have zero to do with the shark attacks, which are executed like shit, so it isn't exactly a monster movie. What is there left to watch?

If you answered "a parade of crunk faces to draw (such as Jared Leto and Michelle Williams B.C.)," then you are absolutely right. Buy this film now.

Ransom of Red Chief (1998)

Before the world embraced him in Pay it Forward and then rejected him in everything else, Haley Joel Osment starred in this TV western about, I guess, an ugly nine year-old boy. That's what I got out of the ten minutes I watched.

Shakes the Clown (1991)

One would think that the words "Bobcat Goldthwait" and "clown" in one movie would insure hilarity. No, wait. One would assume it would insure attempted hilarity. But not Shakes the Clown, in which Goldthwait plays an alcoholic clown. It actually shows its viewers the tears of a clown. When I figured out it wasn't really a comedy, I became terrified and turned it off immediately.

Rollerball (2002)

Outside of Chris Klein uttering perhaps the dumbest line of dialogue in history, I don't remember a single thing about this movie. Anyway, here's the line:

"Look at all these baubles!"

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

You now know enough never to have to sit through Rollerball.

The Secret (2006)

The concept of wish fulfillment is nothing new. Neither is the power of positive thinking. But when adapted for a modern audience and repackaged as a shortcut to material wealth and the acquisition of actual stuff, those hippie-dippy 70s notions suddenly start to seem pretty attractive to a modern audience.

The Secret argues that if you want something of material value all you have to do is visualize it hard enough and eventually the sky will rain money. In some parts of the world, the idea of trying to wish something into existence by sheer force of will is known as "prayer," but the religion practiced by followers of the secret prizes new cars over new insights, cash and prizes over a deeper understanding of self. But unlike religion, the secret is intended for personal gain only, and it is this transparent materialism that is both its best quality and its most egregious affront.

And it really needed to be turned into an entire documentary film? Those producers must really have been using the secret.

Polar Express (2004)

In 2004, motion capture technology had not come as far along as Robert Zemeckis evidently thought. (Hell, it didn't even look that much better by the time Beowulf came out three years later.) Why else would the director have spent $170 million on a movie in which the world's most charming actor was processed through a thousand computers only to emerge with a charmless, dead-eyed gaze. Some of the best minds in the world couldn't figure out how to use this technology effectively, and it turned what could have been just another unremarkable children's movie into a chilling zombie classic.

The story is set on Christmas Eve, when a young boy is kidnapped by a mystery train filled with other zombie children being absconded to the North Pole. The children are frequently left alone, every once in a while receiving visits from a spooky conductor or a dance troupe of waiters flinging hot chocolate every which way on a moving train. They are then thrown into a series of meaningless adventures, one more terrifying than the next. I can't answer for sure whether the children make it to the North Pole and discover the true meaning of Christmas after all, because the 100 minute runtime proved to be about 30 more minutes of zombie train conductors than I could possibly handle.

Pinocchio (2002)

When does a movie truly warrant a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes? When is the consensus of a film so uniformly terrible that fifty-two people from all over the world are repulsed into agreement? When does a viewer finally have to sit back and admit, "This is quite possibly the worst movie I've ever seen."

The answer to all three of those questions is Pinocchio, Roberto Benigni's directorial follow-up to his Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful. In his adaptation of the 19th Century children's classic, Benigni takes on the role of Pinocchio himself, though the actor playing the little boy was fifty years old at the time of the movie's release. Seeing Benigni frolic around in little boy's pajamas is downright ghoulish, particularly when juxtaposed against his bald spot. It's sad to watch a decrepit old man take on this role, and the entire affair is made even more horrifying is the English language dub in which Pinocchio is voiced by -- horrors -- Breckin Meyer.

Patch Adams (1998)

Yes, it's as bad as you've heard. Probably the worst in the genre of Robin Williams Touches Your Heart films (which shares much in common with the genre of Robin Williams Has A Beard films), Patch Adams is a film in which Robin Williams is a medical student (NOT EVEN A DOCTOR) who gives comfort to terminally ill children by putting bedpans on his feet and dancing around a pediatric oncology ward. Lady, he inspires a frail old woman to eat by hurling her into a swimming pool filled with spaghetti (not to mention other hospital employees). Tear-jerking, indeed.

Pearl Harbor (2001)

Though 2001's Pearl Harbor might not be Michael Bay at his most explode-iest (that distinction would probably go to at least six of his other movies), the explosions that do take place are the most meaningful in his oeuvre. That's because in Pearl Harbor, Michael Bay gets to blow up the country he loves.

Pearl Harborfeatures many stars who, though at the height of their fame when this movie was made, were mostly unmasked later as talentless frauds. Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale, and Josh Hartnett all frolic around emoting about love and war, using World War II as background scenery. The bad guys, meanwhile, are depicted as slanty-eyed Bad Guys, Japanese "Others" who wish harm on the soft lighting of Kate Beckinsale's bounteous American bosom. And as a special bonus, with a runtime of 183 minutes, you get to watch the war unfold nearly in real time.

Madea's Family Reunion (2006)

This movie deserves very little text to explain its sheer awfulness. "Madea" is Tyler Perry's smug alter ego, the one who lets him spell out his backwards and sexist morals before taking a cheap shot at some invented persecution (sometimes with a handgun) for a knowing, hateful laugh. It's a cowardly way to have it both ways -- the lesson and the laugh -- and it's exactly how Tyler Perry operates from start to finish. He is shameful for painting the liberation of women as a bad thing. He is despicable for the way he speaks down to black people while pretending to be on their side. He focuses the anger of a community on straw men so he can claim himself to be their champion. His methods are simply too much like those of a dictator... or, even more chillingly, like the Cat in the Hat.

Oh yeah, Madea's Family Reunion is about old people making young people feel guilty for having goals and dreams besides believing in Christ. It also features Madea (a hulking man in a dress) violently beating a child.

These movies are all the same anyways. Actually, each one only gets worse.

Love in the Time of Cholera (2007)

Well, this movie is just terrible. It's adapted from the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, which is noted for its subtle but relentless tangents on love. It's the kind of book where you ought to think long and hard about why you're turning it into a movie, because when a book's essence is so rambling and delicate, a movie really ought to find a different way to persuade you of the same things.

The movie fails because it never relents, and it's never subtle. The direction is so blunt that Florentino (Javier Bardem) comes across as a portrait of dogged evil. It's a story about a man obsessed with a woman (Fermina, Giovanna Mezzogiorno) who won't have sex with him, so he becomes a sex addict to cope with his unrequited penis. Without ever knowing more than the pure visual fact of it, we watch Florentino have sex with everyone between endlessly stalking a very homely girl and ruining her entire life. Fermina's strikingly unremarkable qualities make Florentino's decades-long obsession with her even more frightening: this torture could be inflicted on anybody!

Shakira supplies the required ethnic wailing a couple of times, so you can feel free to go clubbing in your seat. Incidentally, Shakira was denied a role in the film by the producers because she wouldn't show her breasts... however, we think she dodged a bullet, considering the horrible aging makeup used to make everybody look like a raw biscuit.

It's all heading to an amazing scene in which 80-year-old Florentino and Fermina finally have their sex. Except, the two lovers are both younger actors wearing old person naked suits. What exactly is brave about this scene? Those aren't her boobs. Those fake old boobs might as well have been Carmen Miranda coconuts covering up a full-body cat suit. Talk about getting the notes but not the melody.

The point is, it's really amazing. You should check it out.

Lethal Justice (1995)

This film is so weird. Every one of its ugly pieces seems to ooze out of horror films from anywhere between 1960 and 1980, anywhere besides 1995, when it was actually made. The film quality is terrible, first of all. The acting (with one exception) is barely human behavior. All the production values are so bad. AND THAT MUSIC.

It's about a teacher that gets raped by a student while her entire class lets him do it. That's a fine starting point for a dissection of modern youth along the lines of, What let this happen?, but then this movie really sucks. The rapist parades around to class for the rest of the day, no sweat. He even brags about it to his classmates, one of whom pats him on the back like they just won the big game.

That kind of bravado pretty hard to swallow, honestly. There's a rapist in the classroom, and ANYBODY is still learning math? Good heavens. Also, the rapist comes from a rich mom, so the police aren't going do anything about it, since we are meant to understand that the cops are in his mother's pocket. Nobody mentions the Mob, so she must actually be that filthy rich. This is dealt with in just one scene, where mom confronts the teacher who was just raped and assures her that her raping son is never going to be punished. Sheesh. The rape and its immediate aftermath are handled with such brutal honesty it seems like this might actually be some forgotten cinematic treasure, but then the mom announces with a grin, re: shutting up the rape victim: "I'm going to use ALL my guns." Does this woman even exist outside of Hell? It plays even weirder than it sounds.

Anyway, the victim's fellow teachers take LETHAL JUSTICE into their own hands. What follows is some pretty creative vigilante justice (turning back the clocks to create an alibi for a beatdown) and the kind of too-raw, go-for-broke acting that always shows up in movies like this. Why is that, anyway? Maybe it's because real actors have learned that audiences don't want to see that shit.

But that's just LETHAL JUSTICE.

Jumper (2008)

David Rice (Hayden Christensen) is a young man with the ability to "Jump" -- he can teleport anywhere he wants. Naturally, his first deliberate act is to make everyone think he is dead, run away from his dad, and rob a bank. This is actually a fine opening for a story about using your powers to find personal redemption, but the movie does not go this way.

Cut to four years later and David has used the money to buy an incredible New York City loft apartment. There is no reason to assume he isn't still robbing banks. He is actually seen ignoring a drowning flood victim on the live news, whom we know he could easily save by teleportation, but instead he teleports to the kitchen to make a sandwich. Then he teleports to the fridge to get a soda. It's like, what a jerk. Why isn't David morbidly obese? He never has to move. All he needs is to decide whether it is more convenient to be sitting or standing at the next place he teleports to eat. My guess is it's more convenient to sit.

Anyway, Samuel L. Jackson shows up in a snowy-white wig to announce that there is a secret society called "Paladins" whose mission it is to destroy all Jumpers. Jackson zaps David with an electric tether that stops Jumpers from Jumping and then announces with the fury of God that no Jumper should be allowed to keep Jumping without facing the consequences of it, so help him Jesus.

First of all, what a gigantic leap forward in human evolution. Why is it somebody's job to keep Mother Nature from doing her job? I mean, it's just a wig. Second of all, he's meant to be the bad guy only because we're rooting for David, but David is clearly an asshole. Third of all, why is this an action movie about Jumpers versus Paladins? That's just stupid!

Then there's Millie (Rachel Bilson), David's old flame from grade school who gets dragged into his junkie's nightmare after he shows up (apparently) from the dead with the Jumping Police hot on his tail. She repeats over and over that he's acting strange and mean while he insists that nothing is wrong and suddenly Sam Jackson is shooting a flamethrower at her in the Sahara desert.

At one point, David saves himself by Jumping a double-decker bus at Jamie Bell as they fight in the desert, or something. Every single person in that bus is presumably dead or else trapped in the desert. But David survives. Evidently the buried lesson is, that's evolution. You can thank Mother Nature for that.

I Really Hate My Job (2007)

Here are some study questions to ponder before you enjoy this film:

What if an entire restaurant staff was more interested in self-analysis than serving you dinner?

What if a writer-director was more interested in self-analysis than making you a movie?

What are your feelings on writers who can only create surrogates for their own annoying personalities? Aren't they really annoying?

Have you ever heard dialogue so obvious from people so self-loathing, the writer must have thought it was brilliant?

Have you met people so sure that they are better than everyone else, they must actually hate themselves?

What if you met a Portuguese sous-chef that tossed off stupid pearls of wisdom instead of keeping her cigarette out of your food?

Can you relate to a waitress who strips naked in front of the customers when she has an existential crisis?

Have you ever seen a movie that is a 90-minute cry for help?

Would you like to barf every time you enter a restaurant?

And finally...

How obsessed are you with actor Danny Huston? Like oh my God!

Your answer for every question should be... I REALLY HATE THIS MOVIE. It is fascinating as the very worst example of a filmmaker exposing their deepest ugliness for all the world to see. It is fascinating because, for her bravery, I really, really hate her.

Howard The Duck (1986)

... is AWESOME.

The infamous 1986 disaster is exactly as bad as you think, and also ten times better. Executive producer George Lucas wanted to bury it forever (after discovering its wide-release audience was exactly NO ONE), and never released it on DVD in the US. But in fact, "Howard the Duck" is truly amazing because of its brazen dedication to no-holds-barred special effects. It's also a lethally unfunny piece of duck pucky.

The movie begins in "Duckworld," a parallel Earth inhabited by ducks instead of humans, although their city architecture looks exactly the same as ours. Shouldn't it at least be a little different, considering that ducks rose to sentience instead of humans? Anyway. This sets the stage for lame duck (!) puns like "Playduck Magazine." There are also duck puns layered nonsensically on top of callbacks to previous George Lucas projects, which, if we are not witnessing a man in the middle of losing his mind, then please try to imagine what "Breeders of the Lost Egg" could possibly be about.

Howard is a hard-bitten duck (yes, a hard-bitten duck) who gets beamed through a space portal into our world, where he is instantly met with terror and revulsion. Angsty rock star Beverly Switzler (Lea Thompson) finds a kindred lost soul in Howard's displaced melancholy, and... wait.

Where on earth is this movie going? Find one thing at which it succeeds, and you can find three more that undermine it. The plot eventually decides to forget about Howard's "adorable" assimilation into Earth culture and slams on the fuck-it gas, rocketing into high-wire chase scenes, rock 'n roll mutations, gratuitous special effects explosions, and big-screen creature effects that are still dazzling 23 years later, in 2009. It really is a timeless jewel.

The awfulness and dullness of its first hour is almost enough to turn away even the most dedicated Slow Roller. But the second half is so enthralling it makes the entire thing just so delightfully improbable. Make no mistake, "Howard the Duck" is a terrible movie. But it's about the most well-made terrible movie you'll ever see. They don't make them like this anymore. I'm looking at you, "Alvin and the Chipmunks."

Free Willy 3: The Rescue (1997)

This movie features a little boy who looks like the tiny old woman from the Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" commercials, a grown-up Jesse (from "Free Willy") looking like a pre-op FTM transsexual, a whale who plays ball exclusively off-camera, evil whale assassins, condoned kidnapping, glorified and inexcusable violence by the protagonists, poop circles on eyes, a whale keyboard, a robot orca suggestively lifting boys up and down like a mechanical bull, a male part sloppily rewritten for a woman, a little boy who sabotages his dad with such preternatural subtlety that no one could ever trace it back to him, offensive Native American stereotypes, a bar fight where a line of bystanders is yanked aside by something invisible for no reason, and a whaler who learns to love whales after almost being eaten by one and his own son almost kills him... on purpose... for a whale.

This movie is VERY inappropriate.

Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married? (2007)

F*** you, Tyler Perry.

The Story of Us (1999)

In real life, when couples hate each other so much they can't fathom being in the same room together, they break up. In Rob Reiner's 1999 romantic comedy, Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer scream at each other for 90 minutes. Then, Michelle Pfeiffer delivers a rousing monologue in which she weeps about the deliciousness of Chinese food, and they decide to stay together because of it.

Zoom (2006)

It's hard to make quality entertainment for children. For every Harry Potter film, there's a movie starring Tim Allen. And for every movie starring Tim Allen, there's a movie starring Tim Allen as Captain Zoom, leader of an idiot brigade of horrible children with near-useless powers.

A cast of embarrassed actors lines up to further ruin a desperately bad screenplay and utterly inept direction. Tim Allen is horrible. Spencer Breslin is the demo spawn. The film is so bad it's even one of Chevy Chase's worst. Even fans of Courteney Cox won't be convinced to stick around for the entirety of the film's interminable 83 minute run time.

Zardoz (1974)

In 1974, Sean Connery was already a famous actor. He had appeared in something like thirty movies. He had a distinctive, memorable voice. He had played James Bond. Six times. So it was probably a heavy dose of whatever narcotic was most popular in the mid-70s that lead him to accept a role in John Boorman's Zardoz, a movie about a flying stone head which may or may not be god. Come to think of it, that's amazing. I probably wouldn't have turned down that role either.

You, Me, and Dupree (2006)

It isn't like Matt Dillon, Kate Hudson and Owen Wilson possess wholly unimpressive resumes. Matt Dillon has an Oscar nomination. Owen Wilson has all of that cool Wes Anderson cred. And for people who don't understand that Cameron Crowe is a total hack who hasn't made a good movie since 1989, Kate Hudson represents all of the naïve wonderment of the Girl Who Doesn't Actually Exist character in Almost Famous.

But the stars of You Me and Dupree were also the stars of One Night at McCool's, The Big Bounce and Raising Helen, and it was the unfunniest parts of them who showed up to make the worst kind of comedy imaginable: one that revels in sheer human ugliness. Owen Wilson's Dupree crashes a brand-new marriage and immediately engages in behavior ranging from masturbating into a sock to burning his best friend's house down. Were it not for Mike Myers in The Cat in the Hat, Dupree would be considered the least welcome houseguest in film history. It would be funny if it weren't so desperately, tragically cruel.

Wing Commander (1999)

Let's face it…Freddy Prize Jr. and Matthew Lillard are boyfriends. They appeared together in Summer Catch and the Scooby Doo movies, which gives the distinct feeling they fancy themselves as DeNiro and Pacino in Heat, two acting titans people just LOVE to see together. And it's true audiences love to see them together as much as DeNiro and Pacino, but it's less like Heat and more like Righteous Kill.

But this one -- about fighter pilots in the future fighting an interstellar war -- is the worst collaboration among them, as indicated by the fact that we only watched it for ten gruesome minutes.

The Wicker Man (2006)

Since the turn of the century, Nicolas Cage has starred in some of the stupidest movies of the past ten years. But the 2006 remake of the 1973 classic is arguably the worst among them.

Cage stars as Edward Malus, a California police officer who finds himself wandering around an island off the coast of Washington looking for his lost daughter. The island, inhabited entirely by women and bees, doesn't have a lot going on. Neither does the movie. Cage just kind of wanders from place to place like he's the main character in a graphic adventure game, coming across different adventures on his futile (and ultimately meaningless) search for the little girl. His co-star, Kate Beahan, stammers and stumbles through her lines, evidently trying to vamp until the film reaches its 102 minute runtime and they can just kill Malus off once and for all. And as boring as the action is, there's something strangely hypnotic about watching all that inertia, and it's worth watching the whole thing for one of the most hilarious final shots of a movie, ever.

Perfect Stranger (2007)

Free! Press! Dead! Perfect Stranger is Halle Berry's latest effort in her career-long crusade to make Hollywood regret giving her that Oscar. It's a wonder that a mob of Academy members didn't show up at the premiere of this movie, brandishing flaming torches and rioting.

Berry plays the unsexily named Rowena Price, a journalist who goes undercover to solve a murder case. Bruce Willis wanders around collecting a paycheck, and Giovanni Ribisi periodically pops up in order to ugly up a cast otherwise assembled strictly on the basis of its good looks. Critics derided the movie for its ludicrous twist ending, but for a movie which stops making sense from frame one, the problems are a little more systemic.

The Number 23 (2007)

Even if Joel Schumacher's twenty-third (yes, really) directorial effort had been executed perfectly, there might still have been something inherently silly about a film in which an adult man runs scared from a haunted number. But we'll never know, as this alleged "stylish noir thriller" is not stylish, noir, nor in any way thrilling.

In The Number 23, Jim Carrey plays down-on-his-luck dog catcher (yes, really) Walter Sparrow, whose wife -- played by Virginia Madsen, looking embarrassed -- gives him a book entitled "The Number 23." Sparrow becomes so obsessed with the characters in the book that he begins to fantasize himself into it. In those sequences, Carrey plays a private investigator named Fingerling (yes, really), who is also obsessed with the number 23. Fingerling encounters other twenty-three enthusiasts, including a mystery woman named Suicide Blonde (played by the epically untalented Lynn Collins), who utters the film's most hilariously bad line: "Twenty-fucking-three!" Scary, yes. But not in the way anyone who worked on this film intended.

Babylon A.D. (2008)

Okay everybody. This might be the best Slow Roll field trip we've ever had. First of all, I just want to emphasize the fact that Babylon A.D. was released THIS WEEKEND, and we saw it on the SECOND DAY of its release. I also want to point out that its budget was $60 million and Vin Diesel is pretty famous. Maybe not as famous as he would enjoy, since his next movie is the third sequel to The Fast and the Furious, but still. You know his name.

So, one of the things we consider when planning a Slow Roll field trip is how full the theater is likely to be -- obviously, we laugh inappropriately and chat amongst ourselves during the film, but we aren't interested in ruining anyone's night if they really genuinely wanted to catch The Bucket List on the big screen. For example, the night we howled through The Bucket List, the only other audience member was a dude lying across several seats and napping. It was really amazing.

The point is, we usually wait until the end of a film's run to slow roll it in theaters. However, the tanking of Babylon A.D. seemed so inevitable we were willing to take the risk.

And we got to the theater...

And outside the auditorium we found the lobby roped off in a maze to accommodate the hordes of moviegoers too eager to wait another week for Babylon A.D.... people who got in line HOURS early.

The only thing is...

It was completely empty

...

Like, Rapture empty. I kicked myself for not bringing my camera so I could photograph this astonishingly beautiful sight. If I could do it over maybe I would also have brought a tumbleweed to lovingly place in line behind a gang of crickets. It was EMPTY.

After I got over this profound euphoric experience, we decided to actually go inside the auditorium and see if anyone had already taken their seats.

Nope

Completely empty

It was incredible.

I'm not even going to talk about the movie itself. Believe me, it was hysterically awful... and totally worth a trip to your local cinema to experience the special honor of being the only person in the theater to see Babylon B.C. Or A.D. Whatever.

NOTE: It should be mentioned that even the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, has disowned the movie and expressed "outright disgust" with the movie. Kassovitz claims that 20th Century Fox recut the movie to make it more commercial, which is so hilarious I will probably laugh all the way to my grave, but Kassovitz isn't really off the hook considering his last movie was Gothika.

Premonition (2007)

Thursday. Monday. Saturday. Tuesday. Friday. Sunday. Wednesday.

If you believe the above to be the proper order of the days of the week, it is entirely possible you are a) sorely mistaken, b) a resident of Planet Krazy Kalendar, or c) Sandra Bullock's character, Linda Hanson, in the feature film Premonition. It's a premise so silly and gimmicky we couldn't believe it didn't die in the pitch stage. We also couldn't believe the director didn't put the credits smack dab in the middle of the movie, just to drive home how darn out of order the whole thing is.

One terrible (for her and for us, but for different reasons) morning, Linda wakes up to find a policeman at her front door, who has come calling to inform her that her husband has died in a terrible car accident out at mile marker 220. Unfortunately, the police weren't able to get to her until this morning, and Linda and her two daughters are quite upset by the news. After falling asleep in a stupor, Linda wakes up to find her husband sitting in the kitchen enjoying his morning cup of coffee It is now the previous Monday, and her husband is still alive.

By Monday night, Linda believes the previous day was nothing more than a terrible dream. That is, until she wakes up next on Saturday morning to find her husband dead, her family preparing for his funeral later that morning, her daughter's face marred with unexplained and unsightly cuts, and pretty much everyone around Linda thinking she's lost her mind. By the end of the day, Linda's family has decided that she is responsible not only for the cuts on her daughter's face but as well for the murder of her husband. By the time Saturday night has come and gone, Linda has been committed to mental institution. Good thing she wakes up next the previous Tuesday.

In fairness, Premonition earns its spooky cred exactly two times: the first time we find out Linda's husband is dead, and the first time we find out he isn't. After that, the drawn out ways in which the movie tells us her husband is once again alive (or dead) become laughable, seeing as her husband is dead one day and alive the next (or vice versa) six times in the movie.

By Tuesday, Linda starts to get the picture. Having been committed to the most sinister sanitorium since a fair maiden sang "I Love My Love" from a tower at Bedlam, Linda sets to finding out answers. Using a piece of oak tag and a marker, she plots out the days she's already lived and recollects which events took place on which day. By doing this, she deduces that she still has Friday (after Jim dies) and Sunday (before Jim dies) to figure out how not to end up all tied up in the booby hatch and covered in Saturday. But why would Linda know that she is stuck inside of one exact calendar week, and that she would experience the day of Jim's death last of all those days? Why has this housewife in the suburbs become so comfortable with the concept of time travel so quickly that she inherently understands that it will fit into an exact frame of days of her own deciding? Why wouldn't she just as easily fall asleep one night and wake up the next day in, say, the Crusades, or the future? It is as if Linda is aware of the plot of the movie and has decided to play along.

It would be easy to suspend disbelief if this were the only inconsistency in the movie. But it's not, though. For example, the film ends after a fateful climax at mile marker 220 early Wednesday morning. Linda thinks she has saved her husband, who pulls over to the side of the road in the nick of time, only to pull back into traffic at her insistence and then quickly get obliterated by an oncoming tanker. In the timeline of the movie, she runs toward the fire, cries, pounds the ground in sorrow, and...credits. But in the timeline of the planet, we are to assume that Linda turned her car around, drove home, did some light chores, picked her daughters up from school, didn't tell them that their father was dead, went to sleep, and then woke up the next morning to find a cop on her doorstep. A cop, by the way, who probably would have been on the scene of a fiery highway crash the previous day and would have talked to witnesses, such as the dead man's wife. Before the movie even started, Linda Hanson drove away from the scene of a manslaughter. I would say it's no wonder that her family wanted to have her committed, but no one every found out she spent Wednesday morning at the scene of a murder and Wednesday night not telling anyone about it.

Even more strangely is that it took until Thursday for the police to inform Linda her husband had died. After all, mile marker 220 was in the middle of a well-paved road not far from her home, and it seems that notifying the family would have been law enforcement's top priority. Then again, it is doubtful the police even needed to tell her, seeing as this fatal accident probably would have broken into regular programming on her local news station, as well as showing up in every traffic report for several hours afterwards. If Linda didn't want to find out her husband was dead until Thursday, she had to go pretty far out of her way to ignore it.

And then, there's the small matter of the little girl's face. On Tuesday, Linda's older daughter sustained a household injury when she ran face first into a sliding glass door in an attempt to escape a thunderstorm. Her face get pretty well crunked up, and when we first see her (on Saturday), her wounds look pretty bad. So it's extremely odd that the first day in the movie's timeline -- that would be Thursday -- features several shots of the daughter, and NONE OF THEM SHOW EVEN A SCRATCH ON HER LITTLEPUNIM. And as much as you can let the movie's absurdity off the hook because it's a genre piece that has to rewrite the rules a little, you can't argue that faceful of glass would send a girl to the emergency room on Tuesday, heal completely by Thursday, and look its worst on Saturday because that's the day for everyone to look sad and crazy.

Even the dead cannot escape such a brazen lack of continuity. On Saturday, the day of the funeral (and the day is goes aaaaaaaaall wrong for Linda), Linda devises a theory that her husband isn't really dead (after all, she just saw him alive yesterday and tomorrow) and demands to see the inside of the coffin. The pallbearers listen to her request for some reason, despite the funeral director's shouted protests that Jim sustained some "severing" as a result of his accident. The coffin hits the ground, and Jim's head comes rolling on out. Considering the giant explosion that killed him looked like a scene out of The Marine, I'd say Jim got off easy with a severed head.

Perhaps it would have been a more compelling argument for incarceration had anyone known Linda was at the scene of the crime. After all, it bears mentioning that Jim was driving out of town so he could cheat on Linda with this new blond from the office named Claire. He deserves exactly what he gets, and she's just the right person to give it to him, however inadvertently. Instead of being an awesome revenge fantasy, though, Linda pusses out and visits a priest in the movie's final act, who blames her predicament on a culture that doesn't believe in anything anymore. And that's why Thursday now comes before Monday. Because god doesn't like Sandra Bullock.

In conclusion, not one character in Premonition ever has so much as one premonition. Credits.

Firewall (2006)

I've wanted to see Firewall since the trailer made me snort soda through my nose in the theater. Something about "techno-thrillers" always cracks me up because they want to be edgy and high-tech, but have to dumb it down for non-computer-types in the audience. Usually this manifests in a scene where the star rattles off some complicated jargon, and a side character dryly comments, "How about in English, for the rest of us?" or "What in the hell did you just say!"

The Firewall trailer also made me laugh because it didn't even pretend to bring something new to the table. Little did I know how rich a thriller it truly was. In fact, as we were watching it, I felt compelled to write down all the thrilling thrills that thrilled me.

- Going to work
- Having a meeting
- Burning a CD
- Eating cookies
- Watching The Flintstones
- Piano music with low notes
- Harrison Ford's "intense" voice
- Checking email
- Online banking
- Playing board games with mom
- Making list of teas
- Shorter list of coffees
- Pretending to be asleep
- Torrential downpours of rain
- Coming home from work...
- ...and no one's there!
- Hitting people with the blender
- Virginia Madsen's forehead
- It's still raining, isn't that scaaaaary?
- Nude Robert Forster
- Watching The Food Network
- Driving a car
- More online banking
- Looking for a dog
- Waiting for the phone to ring
- Razzing the kidnappers

Just be warned, everyone, I didn't make any of these up, so you can't say I didn't warn you when you're watching Firewall, covering your face and begging for God to give you strength to cope with all these thrilling thrills.

Recommendation: If you enjoy a bad thriller as much as I do, this one is for you. And if you catch any thrills that I missed here, don't forget to post in the comments!

Bratz (2007)

Sometimes it's unfair to pick on movies intended for younger audiences. On the other hand, shit is still shit if it's in a cute box with pink letters surrounded by crunk babes.

The terrible premise: They made a live-action movie based on dolls with giant heads, giant lips, and no noses. Four girls enter high school and overturn the rigid clique system, which they accomplish by being rude assholes to everyone but each other. Just kidding -- they are rude assholes to each other too.

First let me tell you what happens in Bratz, then I'll explain why its message is so dangerous to young girls. You see, the Bratz are bestest friends and they plan on remaining bestest friends throughout high school. The problem is, they make different friends with common interests and stop spending time with each other. Except Yasmin, the Mexican Brat, whom the movie depicts as Mexican by having A MARIACHI BAND IN HER KITCHEN. She also enjoys singing "La Cucaracha" in her bedroom. I'm not making this up.

And then... get ready for it... it's my favorite part of the movie... It cuts to TWO YEARS LATER.

TWO YEARS LATER.

Two years later, we revisit the Bratz, and they're happily socializing with different groups of people with common interests. Except Yasmin, because she's a fucking loser who sings "La Cucaracha" in her bedroom. So Yasmin convinces the other Bratz that it's a tragedy that they're not friends anymore, and guilt trips them into abandoning their other friends and sitting with her at lunch.

Here's the thing: outgrowing friends and branching out socially when you go to high school is a HEALTHY thing. I thought it was awesome that the Bratz shook off their elementary school "BFF"s and explored other relationships in this new environment. Yasmin, however, as I have previously stated, is a fucking loser. And she drags her friends down with her because she sucks.

Of course, the message of the movie is that Yasmin is awesome for staying true to friendship or some bullshit like that. In fact, while everyone else was busy making friends and not being fucking losers, Yasmin insulted a deaf kid and failed to join the choir even though she has an "amazing" voice. By the end of the movie, the Bratz have formed a pop group and perform at the MTV Video Music Awards (I'm not making this up) and Yasmin's singing voice is badly dubbed by what is clearly a man.

AND THEN. AND THEN! And then, during the credits, there is a music video by Janel Parrish, the actress playing the Asian Brat who loves math and science. SHE'S NOT EVEN THE BRAT WHO LIKES SINGING, and the movie tries to sell us this twerp as a crossover pop star like Hannah Montana. I've also learned that she's the ONLY Brat who uses her real singing voice. Too bad it really, really sucks.

I've also learned that Ron Fair was involved in this project, which means I'm not paranoid and this movie really was an attempt to form a crossover pop group, because Ron Fair's hobby is manufacturing shitty girl groups. Has anyone else seen Girlicious?

As usual, I've left out many key points from this amazing film, so here is a bulleted list for you:

- Meredith is the evil popular girl who loves cliques and threatens Mexican Brat with a samurai sword
- Cloe is the Blonde Brat who doesn't have a dad or a bank account, as insensitively pointed out by Black Brat
- There is a talent show where the prize is "a scholarship to the university of your choice"
- A 15-year-old boy tries to have sex with a 9-year-old girl

Those are just some of the delights in store for you when you rent this movie RIGHT NOW. Strongly recommended.

Pay It Forward (2000)

Can you think of a really big, really effective way to make the world a better place? One way to start would be to pay forward some bitch slaps to anyone who worked on this movie (GET IT? BECAUSE OF PAYING IT FORWARD).

The terrible premise: Trevor (Haley Joel Osfuck) devises a scheme to make everyone do good deeds for each other and stuff. Meanwhile he pairs his stripper mom (Helen Hunt) with his burn victim teacher (Kevin Spacey).

First of all, everyone in this movie thought they were getting Oscars. It might be impossible to say who expected one more, Kevin Spacey or Helen Hunt. I mean Kevin Spacey puts on some major burn victim makeup. Then there’s Helen Hunt, dressing up like Erin Brockovich and writing her Oscar speech on the same day. She really thought people were going to call her performance “brave.” In fact, it’s shit.

And then there’s Haley Joel Fuckface. He might be the worst child actor of all time, and I really mean that. He acts like a little grownup, except whatever grownup he’s acting like is a terrible actor too. And his character is just HORRIBLE. Trevor is so passive-aggressive and evil I couldn’t believe he wasn’t supposed to be the villain.

(Jim Caviezel is also in this movie, playing a junkie who meets Trevor and promptly starts using drugs again, because that’s what anyone would do if they had to hang out with Trevor.)

So what happens in Pay It Forward? Helen Hunt looks like Mount Rushmore and clomps around in wedge heels like Juwanna Mann, and tries to make every scene her Oscar clip. I’m sorry to keep bringing up her Oscar hopes but they come at you like a tidal wave when you’re watching this movie. She starts up a romance with Trevor’s teacher, which is incredibly inapprocpiate, and they fall in love for reasons we never learn because the movie skips the step of showing anything they like about each other. Eventually, they fight and get back together and stuff. It doesn’t mean anything because TREVOR DIES AT THE END.

YES TREVOR DIES AT THE END. HALEY JOEL FUCKFACE GETS KNIFED ON SCHOOL GROUNDS WHILE HIS MOM AND TEACHER ARE WATCHING. No explanation why anything like this would—I’m sorry. I just realized I’m not confused at all as to why someone would want to knife Trevor. However, the entire world is really upset about it and mourners from all over the country swarm Helen Hunt’s house with candles. Because they love paying it forward so much. YES, REALLY.

Recommendation: If you’re a fan of bad acting, look no further than Pay It Forward. The three lead actors give it their absolutely all, and it’s absolutely HILARIOUS.

Let's Go To Prison (2006)

I'm not going to pretend there are no laughs in the alleged comedy Let's Go To Prison. On the contrary, there is exactly one laugh in Let's Go To Prison. Here it is.

You've now seen all of the good parts. You're welcome.

The terrible premise: Career criminal John Lyshitski (Dax Shepard) hates the judge who keeps sentencing him to prison, so when the judge dies Lyshitski gets the judge's son, Nelson Biederman IV (Will Arnett), put in prison, then gets himself put in prison so he can torture Biederman in retaliation for his father's misdeeds. Instead of, say, just not committing any more crimes. Or torturing Biederman on the outside. Or being mad at himself for being such a dumb criminal, rather than at the judge who keeps sending this guy to prison for stuff he's actually done wrong.

Let's Go To Prison shares some disturbing parallels with the alleged comedy Unaccompanied Minors, in that both films feature a lot of funny people popping up without any of them ever doing or saying anything funny. This is a movie directed by the co-creator of one of my favorite shows ever ("Mr. Show with Bob and David") and starring an actor from one of my favorite shows ever ("Arrested Development," duh). It's also written by a bunch of guys from "Reno 911" (everyone else's favorite show ever). All that talent resulted in one funny scene, and that scene isn't funny because of its dialogue, because there isn't any.

Let's Go To Prison is one of the most lazily written movies I've ever seen. Shepard's character is named "John Lyshitski" for no other reason than to have the word "shit" every couple of lines in the film. The movie opens with Lyshitski delivering an endless voiceover monologue that offers statistics about prison life: how many people are in prison, how long they stay there, what happens once they get out. Some of these facts might be interesting in the context of a Morgan Spurlock documentary, but it starts the movie out on such a serious note that the filmmakers can only wrestle their way back into comedic territory by repeatedly reminding us that the main character's last name has the word "shit" in it. Also, one of the lines from the opening monologue is as follows: "Enough people are raped in prison to fill a stadium more than three times. Can you picture that? Three stadiums of people raping each other? I know I can't."

Perhaps this movie is actually a genius experiment. Since there's no way all of the dialogue can actually be from an original script, the writers must have stitched the script together using only lines that were spoken by comedians on VH1's "Half-Hour Comedy Hour" in the 1980s. Like Moises Kaufman's "The Laramie Project," Let's Go To Prison must only draw on secondary source material to achieve its structure. After all, there's no other excuse for material like this:

*A joke about Drakkar Noir.
*A joke about someone stealing the giant check out of the Publisher's Clearinghouse van and then taking it to a bank and trying to cash it.
*The following observation about people who serve on juries: "These people are so dumb they couldn't think of a way to get out of jury duty."

And that same jury that's supposedly so dumb then proceeds to find a guilty man guilty. Who's dumb now, Let's Go To Prison?

Recommendation: You already have the video link of the only funny twenty seconds of the movie. Why are we still discussing this?

Beowulf (2007)

Did anyone think was a good idea? Besides Robert Zemeckis? And apparently lots and lots of Americans who paid money to see the mannequin porn that is Beowulf? Who asked for this movie? Who wants to see organic humans eliminated from the filmmaking process? So many questions.

The terrible premise: A hero named Beowulf swoops in to save a kingdom from a monster, and ends up fucking the monster's mom, who gives birth to a dragon who kills Beowulf 50 years later. Oh, and the movie is completely computer-generated.

You all know what I'm going to say, right? You already know I'm going to complain that all the characters looked like dolls with glassy dead eyes? Well, you have no fucking idea. This was one of the most upsetting moviegoing experiences I've ever had. And I don't know why everyone thinks the technology has advanced enough to make movies like this, because it definitely, definitely hasn't.

And again, why is this something to aspire to? Didn't Robert Zemeckis swear off live-action to concentrate on motion-capture animated films? Someone told me that. Why would anyone want to do that? What's wrong with having human beings in movies? And honestly, Shrek was much more convincing in terms of looking photo-real. Probably because it depicted a world that didn't exist, so my brain didn't have anything real to compare it to. In Beowulf, all I could think was, "Well, I've seen people before... and these are NOT them."

Okay, and how about the fact that everyone keeps getting naked in this fucking movie? Why? In the first scene, Anthony Hopkins' computer-generated ass. When Beowulf settles down to wait for the monster, he gets buck naked and takes a nap. Then, when he's fighting the monster, Beowulf's computer-generated ass and junk. Well, not quite his junk, because Robert Zemeckis saw Austin Powers and decided that "genitals barely obscured by passing objects" was a really classy way to handle epic mythology. Other times (MANY TIMES), naked Beowulf is actually spreading his legs at the camera and there's just a blurry area.

And of course Angelina Jolie plays a sex demon who likes to walk around totally nude except for high heels, which are built into her feet. And she has gold boobs which are totally irresistible to every man in the movie, causing her to give birth to monsters or whatever.

Probably the worst thing about this movie is how cheap it looks, for how expensive and "cutting-edge" it's supposed to be. There are only two locations in the whole movie: a tavern and a cave. I was like, "Is THIS the kingdom? Is this what's at stake? Why do only 15 people live in this kingdom? Why do I care if they die? Why does Robin Wright Penn look like Glenn Close dipped in wax?"

I will say, however, that I was not bored during the movie. Every scene is a new opportunity to be horrified and thank god that this new style of filmmaking will never, ever catch on, because I'm pretty sure everyone who sees Beowulf is going to jump off a bridge afterward and there will be no one left to buy tickets for Beowulf 2: Guys and Dolls.

Recommendation: Take the plunge. And if you're interested in liking this movie at all, SEE IT IN 3-D. That's the only way it could be remotely entertaining (and in fact, the way it was meant to be seen).

Gah. I need to take a shower.

Twisted (2004)

If there are two things that come naturally to Ashley Judd, it's being (a) tough, and (b) sexy. She's starred in plenty of thrillers requiring her to be tough and sexy, and even though Double Jeopardy was the only good one, at least she found her calling. Twisted is like a parallel universe where Ashley Judd is a gross, wimpy lesbian who thinks she's the real Ashley Judd.

The terrible premise: Jessica Shepard (Judd) is a homicide detective who likes to get wasted and pick up nasty dudes at the local dive bar. And every guy she screws is found dead. If you just made a connection between Jessica and these murders, you're an hour and 15 minutes smarter than anyone in this movie.

I swear to god I have not seen acting this bad since Jessica Alba in Honey. I thought Ashley Judd could act, I really did, but there is no excuse for her performance here. Oh wait, maybe she's WASTED. This movie should be called "Ashley Judd Drinks a Whole Bottle of Wine in Every Scene." And every single time, Jessica passes out and wakes up with a dead body. Like, if that happened to me ONCE, I wouldn't drink again for a while. Cut to Jessica guzzling another bottle of wine the next damn night!

The biggest mystery in Twisted is that there is no mystery. Jessica is the #1 suspect from the first frame of the movie, and soon there is a mountain of incriminating evidence, and everyone is still wondering how these murders happened. And Jessica never stops to think, "Wow, I black out for 18 hours and wake up next to dead bodies every day. I hope we get a lead soon!" Did Jessica commit the murders? No, but that doesn't mean she shouldn't have been arrested after the opening credits. The solution is even dumber than you can imagine.

Have I mentioned that Ashley Judd's acting is terrible? Every time she swore, I was like, "She's never cursed before." Every time she pulled out her gun, I was like, "She's never held a gun before." You know what she has done before, though? GOTTEN WASTED AND KILLED DUDES EVERY DAY. This is to say nothing of her crunk hairstyle, which changes in every single scene and makes her look like Mary Martin as Peter Pan. Except Mary Martin would look more convincing kicking Samuel L. Jackson's ass.

Recommendation: This movie is HILARIOUS. I highly recommend it if you're looking for a procedural-type slow roll.

NOTE: As an added bonus, Twisted features not one, but TWO cast members in common with Riding the Bus With My Sister.

The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002)

Somewhere between "I'm Gumby, dammit" and "It's great to be nominated," Eddie Murphy experienced a brief career slump known to his career as "most of the 1990s and 2000s." Not content to make a few generally terrible films (Holy Man, Metro), make a few more (I Spy, Showtime), and sink into obscurity, Murphy decided to go supernova, headlining one of the most staggering critical and commercial failures of all time. Costing $100 million (plus $20 million in marketing) and earning just $7 million (that's worldwide box office, people), this miserable flick doesn't work as a thriller, doesn't work as a comedy, doesn't work as science fiction, and certainly doesn't work as a showcase for the vocal stylings of Jay Mohr. It also features an alarming number of horny robots, including Randy Quaid in what must be the most humiliating moments of his life captured on film.

There's nothing to say about The Adventures of Pluto Nash that you couldn't already guess, but we'll say it anyway: poor Rosario Dawson. Poor Pam Grier. Poor Peter Boyle. Poor Luis Guzmán, doomed to drive a Winnebago loaded with Mexican stereotypes across the lunar wasteland just in case Eddie Murphy and his gang of bozos need a ride. If you're wondering about the chain of events that led Murphy & Co. out there in the first place, don't look at us -- we're still wondering why mankind would choose to develop property on a moon made entirely out of Styrofoam. The production design is so shoddy it's impossible to forget that you're watching actors on a set, making us wonder where a dime of that $100 million went; we suspect the money was sunk into subsidizing the cost of lobotomies for the six people who dared to sit through this movie.

Memorable quote: "Do you know how hard it is to get wood on the moon?"

Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)

It may be impossible to make a good movie out of a video game. I can't think of any example where it's gone right. But I don't see why -- it's not like the end of the world isn't interesting enough, or Milla Jovovich isn't talented enough to carry a movie by herself. Okay, just kidding about the second part.

The terrible premise: 5 years after a zombie virus made everyone into zombies or something, Alice (Jovovich) drives around the desert killing zombies and stuff. Meanwhile, other people get killed by zombies. And, corporations are baaaaad!

The first thing that scared me about this scary movie was the number of familiar faces, such as Ali Larter (Heroes) and Ashanti. Yes, ASHANTI. Like the end of the world isn't bad enough, I'm looking at Ashanti on the big screen. I guess she had to record an album or something because she gets eaten by zombie birds like as soon as the opening credits finish rolling.

Anyway, the whole world has been turned into desert wasteland, which is a convenient way to save money on sets. Alice rides around killing zombies and wearing sensible survival gear, such as a miniskirt with garter belt and stockings. She must have seen that on Survivorman or something. In the first action scene, Alice answers a distress call that turns out to be hillbillies trying to feed her to their zombie dogs. This is a situation I just don't understand so let's move on.

Basically, some guy in a research facility is trying to cure the zombie virus, and he needs Alice's blood to do that. For some reason, this movie makes the scientist the bad guy! I know he has a British accent and everything, but he's the only one I agree with in this movie. What's so evil about trying to cure the zombie virus? But he's part of a corporation, so he's evil. It's too bad that Alice is such a fucking hippie that she won't cooperate with him for the good of mankind.

Then there is the matter of the bird attack. All of a sudden, a swarm of zombie crows attacks this caravan of survivors and eats most them alive. My question is, if animals can become zombies too, WHERE ARE THE REST OF THEM?! Why isn't anyone worried about ZOMBIE RATTLESNAKES? ZOMBIE GRIZZLY BEARS? I can't believe how fast they killed Ashanti though. She must have been singing her greatest hits until the director was like, "Ash, there's been a script revision where you quit singing and get off my set. So uh, let's feed you to birds."

In fact, nothing scary actually happens in Extinction, but it tries to convince you that something is happening by having sudden loud noises for no reason. For example, Alice's foot bumps a jar on the floor somewhere, and the "clink" sound effect was like someone came into the theater and broke the jar over my head. Which I guess is pretty scary, but has nothing to do with zombies.

To its credit, this movie contains one of the most amazing death scenes in cinema history, where Carlos (Oded Fehr) is surrounded by zombies and finds a huge blunt nearby, so he lights up and gets soooooo high while zombies devour him. I mean, wow.

Recommendation: Why don't I just tell you that Paul W.S. Anderson (Alien Vs. Predator) wrote this movie, and you'll probably have a good idea of whether you should see it or not.

Pathfinder (2007)

A while ago I saw Pathfinder in the theater. Maybe you haven't heard of this movie, and I can't imagine why since the public demand for a shitty movie about Vikings terrorizing Native Americans was so high. Perhaps I can jog your memory by mentioning that it stars Karl Urban, who played John "Reaper" Grimm in the movie adaptation of Doom.

I saw Pathfinder with a friend who worked on the movie, and we were fortunate enough to be the entire audience at this showing, because Spider-Man 3 had just opened. Also, it was Pathfinder, so London 2: Londoner could have been the only other choice that week and we still would have been alone in that theater.

Since we had the theater all to ourselves, my friend was able to provide a running commentary on the movie and her experience working with this shitty director whose name I don't even feel like looking up. All you need to know is that he was German, and he thought he was making an amazing movie. He also thought he was making a gritty movie by draining most of the color from every shot so I thought the movie was supposed to be in black and white. "These shots were gorgeous the way they shot them," my friend said. "Now I have no idea what's going on."

My personal favorite element of the whole movie is how many different seasons each scene took place in. I mean, it takes some nerve to intercut snowy landscapes with sunny hillsides IN THE SAME SCENE as if they're taking place CONTINUOUSLY. This movie really had some balls.

Also, Pathfinder kept showing Native Americans being unable to handle their own environment, like they keep drowning or breaking through frozen ice or running into bears and almost biting the dust. Or falling onto wooden spikes that THEY THEMSELVES SET UP. Like, the Native Americans in this movie are clowns. They could not be more clueless about what is involved in being a Native American. They're always so cold and hungry and have no idea what to do about it.

Anyway, that's all. Wow, what a terrible movie. I was kind of jealous of my friend for working on it, though, because she got a rare glimpse directly into the mind of a director who thinks he's making GOLD before it ends up on this website.

She's the Man (2006)

I’m a little speechless after this one. Don’t you remember seeing this trailer and feeling so uncomfortable? That’s what the whole movie is like. She’s the Man is based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, but not really. I mean, I doubt Shakespeare thought his name would be on a movie where people in drag put tampons in their noses. But I’m not an English major.

The terrible premise: Viola (Amanda Bynes) goes undercover as her twin brother Sebastian to join the boy’s soccer team, and falls in love with Duke, her male roommate. So basically it’s a remake of Boys Don’t Cry.

Among other things, She’s the Man suffers from being fundamentally dishonest: Amanda Bynes is, in fact, not the man. She’s not any man that has ever existed, because her impersonation of a man is so weird and spastic, you would think she had never interacted with a man before. Viola breaks character at the drop of a fucking hat, and covers by lowering her voice and croaking, “Dude, man, bro, etc.” For god’s sake, she has a twin brother -- shouldn’t she have some idea what the male version of herself would act like?

Somehow, everyone on campus immediately buys that Viola is a man. If I saw this creature stumbling down the hall of my dormitory, I would call the police and tell them a butch lesbian on heroin was lurking in the boy’s locker room. None of these guys think she’s a butch lesbian -- they think “Sebastian” is a ladies man, even though she “accidentally” tells Duke that he’s hot, ogles him in the locker room, and caresses his ass while they’re hugging. And Duke is never as upset by these things as he should be. Like, after a while, Duke must be gay. Come on.

Also, the whole premise of the movie collapses when it becomes obvious that Viola fucking sucks at soccer. She cooked up this whole plan to prove that she’s good enough to play sports with the boys, but guess what? As I mentioned earlier, she fucking sucks at soccer, so the coach won’t even let her play in “the big game” unless she practices like 20 hours a day. Viola sucks at soccer almost as much as she sucks at being a man, so it’s hard to understand why she’s doing either except that she’s starring in a movie about playing soccer and being a man.

By the way, Amanda Bynes thinks she’s really, really funny. She thinks she is Lucille Ball in this movie. I wrote a note during this movie: “It’s the most acting ever done by a face.” Someone must have told her that more facial expressions equals more comedy, and also that no one can hear you when you make witty asides in response to whatever just happened.” So many “witty” asides, like everyone around her is deaf. This is in addition to her tendency to explicitly state what’s going on in a scene in the middle of the scene.

Recommendation: Okay but secretly though I loved this movie. Just kidding. Or am I?

My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006)

We weren't expecting a lot from a movie called "My Super Ex-Girlfriend," but we were shocked at the mean-spirited nature of this so-called comedy. Instead of exploring superhero powers as a new twist on the battle of the sexes, My Super Ex-Girlfriend uses them as a revolting excuse to make Uma Thurman a dumping ground for male condescension and casual misogyny. It's impossible to tell whether Luke Wilson is phoning it in or simply that one-note, but we are once again subjected to the "aw, shucks" persona his brother Owen has taught us to hate, with an extra side of hapless charm. This time, Wilson is an ordinary guy who dates and breaks up with Jenny Johnson, also known as "G-Girl," the local superhero.

Aside from serving an idiotic title, G-Girl's (vaguely defined) superpowers have absolutely nothing to do with anything, since her asinine hang-ups are ripped from the pages of "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"; if the words "clingy," "passive-aggressive," "controlling," and "probably bipolar" don't appear on her SuperMatch.com profile, you can add "pathological liar" to the list of reasons we would have dumped her too. My Super Ex-Girlfriend seems to argue that G-Girl may be a superhero, but first and foremost she's female: brewing strange emotions in her uterus! No control over when they might be unleashed upon her unsuspecting boyfriend! Randomly sobbing and apologizing for her mental state! In the Victorian era, G-Girl would have been diagnosed with hysteria. Today, we diagnose My Super Ex-Girlfriend with a screenwriter who has never interacted with an actual woman.

Cold Creek Manor (2003)

Movie parents have been recklessly moving their families into haunted houses since motion pictures were invented. We at the Slow Roll are dying to know why these parents always believe they have found "the perfect house" when there isn't a neighbor for 30 miles and their kids can already tell it's evil. Cold Creek Manor is Mike Figgis's witless contribution to a witless genre (recent entries include Darkness and The Messengers), starring Sharon Stone and Dennis Quaid as the guilty parents. "Isn't this place amazing, kids?" they ask as they wander through collapsing hallways infested with ghosts. "You'll get used to it!" they inform their teenage daughter, who seems able to hear the threatening music cues jumping out from every shadow and corner, or even well-lit doorways and appliances. This wouldn't exactly be shocking, since Mike Figgis's score (yes, he composed it himself) reaches farcical levels of unsubtle.

Soon enough, Quaid becomes dangerously obsessed with the previous residents of the house and their brutal unsolved murder, which might have discouraged us from moving into a place already called "Cold Creek Manor," but Quaid opts instead to rehire the menacing former groundskeeper (Stephen Dorff) who kills their horse and throws his wife down a well. It's hard not to feel like mom and dad deserve all this for hauling their kids to a shithole town where the closest thing to someone their own age is Juliette Lewis as the local slut.

Memorable quote: "GERONIMOOOOOOOOO!"

The Lake House (2006)

"Can this be happening?" No. No, it sure can't.

Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock play a pair of would-be lovers who have everything going for them. Except, that is, for the fact that they are victims of the time-space continuum, separated by two years and only able to communicate by writing letters and putting them in a magical mailbox. Despite the ease with which Sandy and Keanu accept these outlandish dating terms ("Even though this is clearly impossible, it's amazing"), we were baffled by scenes such as the walking tour of Chicago on which they embark "together," with voiceover "dialogue" as they converse across their respective timelines. Considering that the exchange of each and every line necessarily involved a lengthy expedition by automobile to the lake house and its magical mailbox, we believe these bozos and their love should be held responsible for any and all destruction resulting from the current climate crisis.

Memorable quote: "Oh, we have a comedian. What'd you have, a clown for breakfast this morning?" -- Kate (Sandra Bullock) revealing her mistaken belief that ingesting clowns will result in an enhanced sense of humor

FANTASY SEQUEL: The Sorting Hat

Radio (2003)

There is nothing more cringeworthy than a major Hollywood star playing a mentally retarded character, a statement which may leave you wondering what this has to do with a film starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. Well, it turns out it's pretty disgusting no matter who it is lurching around and grunting through a set of monster teeth purchased at Walgreens the day before Halloween, purporting to offer a sensitive portrayal of the local retard who taught a small town to love. Ed Harris plays Coach Jones, the asshole who names Radio after an appliance. Never mind the fact that Radio is a human being who might not appreciate being renamed at will like a pet or object. In fact, Coach Jones learns from Radio's mom that his real name is James Robert Kennedy, but this information doesn't make much of an impact on anyone.

Radio's mom is granted all the dignity of dying off-screen so we can get to the climactic football game, but it's hard to feel bad about that when this negligent bat allowed her retarded son to push a shopping cart around back alleys every day. Of course, she and Coach Jones are portrayed as saintly figures whose compassion inspires the high school football team to make Radio their mascot. Radio is a dull, sappy bore that should rightly upset anyone concerned that Cuba Gooding, Jr. pretending to be retarded is the kind of publicity the mentally disabled don't need.

Memorable quote: "Whe' mah pie!"

Material Girls (2006)

What's a pair of ditzy socialite sisters to do when they lose their fortune in scandal, and are forced to take care of themselves while learning that there are more important things in life than money? If you think Material Girls will shed any light on the subject, someone called "the back of the box" lied to you. Right off the bat, we learn that the spoiled Marchetta sisters (played by the charmless Hilary Duff and her giraffe-clown sister, Haylie) only ever risk receiving $60,000,000 as opposed to $100,000,000... each. So it's kind of hard to feel bad for these idiot girls as they accidentally burn down their mansion, shack up with their Colombian housekeeper, and ride public transportation once. What must have been a 60-page script to begin with has been generously padded with such useless observations such as "Oohh, it's windy," and "It smells like beef in here"; saddled with unwelcome bytes such as "I've got an eggroll in my bra, just give me a minute," and "Have you ever heard of post-9/11 immigration delays?"; and sprinkled with shockingly casual racism (Haylie sees a black person entering his own home and screams and runs away; Hilary crudely impersonates a Mexican gangbanger) that is never identified as, I don't know, something the girls could work on.

So, what's a pair of horsey, talentless sisters to do when a project is dumb enough for the Olsen twins to pass on (which they actually did)? If your last name is Duff, you fish it out of the dumpster and call it your own. Material Girls wasn't even safe from its own actors: six months before its theatrical release, Haas publicly stated his displeasure with the film and predicted it would never be released. Sure, Haas turned out to be wrong, but this must have been small consolation to the movie, which was eventually greeted with a 5% on Rotten Tomatoes and upstaged at the box office by such films as Barnyard: The Original Party Animals (which was in its third week of release).

Memorable quote: "Come on, you know how biochemistry calms me down."

SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (2004)

Oh my god. What is going on. SuperBabies has changed my life, in that I'm not sure it's worth living anymore. This isn't even a movie, just an unadulterated nightmare that someone has put on DVD and Target is selling for $5.50. So I guess I just admitted to you that I own it.

The terrible premise: Babies are geniuses who speak their own language. Jon Voight (!) wants to use his cable network to brainwash babies of the world.

I didn't see the first Baby Geniuses, but the concept of intelligent babies sounds pretty useless to everyone. So what if your baby is a genius if he can't even wipe his own ass? My cat is more of a genius than that -- he buries his poop in sand. Even if my cat was an actual genius, who cares because he can't share his brilliant thoughts with anyone except other cats, who are also useless. The point is, I hope someone makes a movie called Kitty Geniuses because it would be so darn cute.

Would you like to know what's not cute? HUMAN BABIES WITH COMPUTER-GENERATED MOUTHS. Wait, I should be fair: they're not actually babies. These kids are like 8 years old. There are no actual babies in SuperBabies. They do become "Super," though, in a horrifying scene involving even more CGI. There is also an even older SuperBaby, apparently from the first movie, called "Kahuna." I feel bad picking on child actors, which is fortunate because most of the movie he's portrayed by a stunt double who is obviously an adult woman.

Oh, and in addition to there being no babies, there are no geniuses either. Maybe they're smart for their age, but not by much. Again, being able to talk doesn't make anyone a genius. Especially if NO ONE UNDERSTANDS YOU.

Do you know what is in this movie? Something called "Muggles the Frog" who is actually a fucking MINSTREL. He's in something that looks silverface, not quite blackface, but with the singing and dancing it might as well be Al Jolson. I'm not making this up or exaggerating. It's so horrific I don't know what to say.

I mentioned that Jon Voight is in this movie. Does he need work? He can clean my house or something. I didn't think I could feel any worse for him after Anaconda, but even his crazy accent from that movie is nothing compared to this. To be fair, I'm not sure anyone could pull off a villain whose arch enemies are babies -- if he really wanted to win, couldn't he just punt them like little footballs? So you can feel Jon Voight pulling back to pretend it's a fair fight.

Also, Scott Baio. Ouch. But if you thought the surprise appearances were over, THINK AGAIN! With absolutely no warning, Whoopi fucking Goldberg shows up in a cameo, to demonstrate that the SuperBabies are friends with celebrities or something. Before you have time to recover from hearing a SuperBaby refer to Whoopi Goldberg as "Whoops," all of a sudden you're looking at O-TOWN. Yes, O-Town! And they sing a new song they wrote just for the SuperBabies! And it sucks!

At this point, everyone was placing bets on who the SuperBabies would be friends with next. I guessed Condoleeza Rice. AND ALL OF A SUDDEN I WAS LOOKING AT GEORGE W. BUSH. YES, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IS IN THIS MOVIE, AND IMPLIED TO BE FRIENDS WITH THE SUPERBABIES.

There is so much more to talk about, but I'll leave it alone now. There is also a slutty babysitter and a SuperBaby "utopia" which kind of resembles Hell.

Recommendation: If you're the kind of person who goes on the scariest roller coasters at the amusement park, maybe you can handle the sheer horror of SuperBabies.

Anaconda (1997)

Wow. Basically, Anaconda lives up to its name, because there is a pretty big snake in this movie. But it's also misleading, because the snake doesn't do anything wrong for like an hour. Instead, the characters kill themselves off by being so stupid, while Anaconda lurks in the water and is like, "This is almost embarrassing."

Let's back up: somewhere in Brazil, a boatload of actors you never thought you would see in the same place (such as Jennifer Lopez, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, Ice Cube, and Owen fucking Wilson) cruise down a river filming a documentary or something similarly intellectual. Basically, they're not expecting to be eaten by Anaconda, that's all you need to know.

However, Jon Voight knows something is up because he leads them into the most dangerous part of the jungle and it becomes apparent that he wants to make millions by capturing the largest snake in the world, even if it costs the lives of his friends. You know, Anacondas are scary, but true evil lies in the hearts of men, etc.

But seriously, Anaconda is so upstaged by these bozos as they fall off the boat, choke on wasps, and get attacked by warthogs. Eric Stoltz spends most of the movie recuperating in bed after scuba diving in the river and CHOKING ON A POISONOUS WASP when he wasn't even using a snorkel, he was breathing from an air tank. So apparently the air tank was full of poisonous wasps. Not Anaconda's fault.

Meanwhile, we get occasional POV shots as Anaconda spies on the boat, except the POV shots are SO HIGH and tilty, so it's hard to imagine what someone else looking at Anaconda would see. Like, a big snake totally sticking out of the water? But like I said, Anaconda isn't reponsible for anything bad that happens for the first hour. There is a brief scene where Anaconda eats a panther, which is pretty crazy, but that's really none of the movie's business. That's called a food chain.

Finally, Jon Voight goes completely crazy, and I'm only partially talking about his character. He is going for some kind of accent here, Russian or Spanish or something. And he's always pulling villainous looks for the camera when no one's looking. This is about when the Anaconda starts eating people.

Let's get something straight: I'm sure an anaconda can eat a whole person, but not like, 10 people in one day. Okay, Anaconda eats Owen Wilson, he's gone, everyone wins. Fine. Anaconda is not going to go jumping back on the boat to eat someone else in like half an hour. That's crazy. That's called being a fucking pig.

In the last scene of the movie, J-Lo and Ice Cube end up in some abandoned factory on top of a hill, and Anaconda fucking COMES OUT OF THE CEILING to attack them! That means Anaconda climbed a whole hill, up the side of the building, and down through the roof, like that's easier than coming in the front door, or just eating a warthog.

And at some point that's not the end, they shoot off Anaconda's face. With a gun. And believe me, that shit is blown pieces. And 10 minutes later? Anaconda attack! And look who's had some reconstructive surgery!

Also, Kari Wuhrer has some screw-on breast implants that are pretty amazing.

Recommendation: Rent this one, and I will tell you exactly why: because Anaconda barfs up Jon Voight, and his partially digested body winks at Jennifer Lopez, and that alone is worth the rental price.

Click (2006)

The calendar year of 2006 saw the release of some pretty bleak movies, from Children of Men to Babel to The Dead Girl. While featuring varying degrees of redemption at the end, none of these films would exactly be found flickering in the background at a roller skating rink. And yet, for many more reasons than one, by far the most depressing movie to hit theaters in 2006 was the Adam Sandler/Christopher Walken magical remote control comedy, Click. Obviously, Click is a bummer on account of it being an inept, unfunny mess that will sour your love of comedy forever and ever. But it's also sad for another reason: almost by accident, Click is a sober meditation on lives wasted and opportunities missed, its message a more real depiction of human sadness and suffering than at least two of the three movies mentioned above.

Click stars Adam Sandler and Kate Beckinsale as Michael and Donna Newman, a middle-class couple with two adorable tykes, all of whom live in a house with a white picket fence in the town of Suburbsville, America. With stunning economy of dialogue, the film's opening scene -- within the first eleven lines, in fact -- finds Michael attempting to operate his television remote, but instead he starts up a remote control car, turns on a ceiling fan, and opens the garage door. I guess the remote that increases the amount of cinematic nuance in a feature film is lost somewhere underneath a couch cushion.

Michael leaves for his job at an architecture firm, but not before his wife reminds him to be on time for his son's swim meet later that day. Once at the office, Michael's diabolical boss, Ammer (David Hasselhoff), treats him like the middle manager he is, telling him flatly that if he wants to make partner in the company he will have to work on July 4 instead of going on a camping trip with his family. Charged to watch an architecture documentary that night (indicating Michael has a LOT of catching up to do and should probably go to work on weekends and Christmas as well), Michael tires of trying to navigate his many remotes and sets off for Bed, Bath, and Beyond to buy a universal.

Once inside the store, Michael finds a back section with a small sign reading "Way Beyond." There, he meets Morty (Walken), who hooks him up with a universal remote that...actually controls the universe. Michael can go back to any time in his life as well as going forward and backwards in his current reality. He can also fast forward through the more bothersome aspects of his life, including showers, traffic jams, family dinners, fights with his wife, illnesses, and waiting for promotions. Michael conjures Morty to ask what happens to him while he's in fast forward mode, and we learn that he goes on "auto pilot." He's there, but he won't be "the life of the party."

Things seem to be going fine for a while because, I mean, what possible comic consequences could there be? Michael is zipping to and from work, slowing down only to watch a young buxom woman run in slow motion. But when Act Two gets underway, Michael finds out that the remote is even smarter than he is. It learns his behavior and fast forwards through things Michael has skipped before. It's the same feature that won't allow you to stop taping Friends in Spanish because you once accidentally told your Tivo you wanted to watch Sabado Gigante. He thus starts to miss all family dinners, all showers, and all fights with his wife. He also loses ten years waiting for a promotion and another six while he gets over cancer. At one point, he wakes up and his father has died. Michael doesn't remember a thing.

Death. Regret. Crushing suburban malaise. Click deals with all these topics, and tackles them in a more real, less arch fashion than American Beauty and other standard bearers of death, regret, and crushing suburban malaise. But that doesn't mean Click is a light comedy with a dark message. Tonally, the film is so out of whack that it seems its inherent core of sadness took the filmmakers completely by surprise. Click compensates for this misery by boomeranging in the other direction, hard. During its lighter moments, Click finds Michael a) watching a series of dogs hump a stuffed duck for no apparent reason and b) passing gas in his boss's paused face for about thirty consecutive seconds. If anyone thinks these moments provide a comedic counterbalance to Michael lying on the ground of a cemetery, lamenting his inability to remember the death of his father, they have got another think coming. Also not brightening the mood is Michael's mid-twenty-first century death scene (you heard me), in which Michael lies on the ground outside of St. Future's Hospital in the pouring rain, wailing to his son not to let his life pass him by. That scene is actually one worth watching.

Click seems to exist in a world where Michael is the only person with a job. His son's swim meet takes place under blazing bright noonday sun on a weekday, but none of the other fathers had any trouble making it. The son's swim coach (played by Sean Astin, whose entire character in the movie is "I wear a red Speedo") pays more attention to the son than Michael himself, which is why Donna eventually divorces her husband and marries him instead. Take that, Michael Newman! That'll teach people in movies to go to work and try to make a better life for themselves and their families!

In a movie whose main character is a television remote control, even the character of Mr. Remote doesn't stick to a steadfast set of rules. Michael uses the remote to change his skin color to make it look like he has a tan, and everyone notices. And yet, moments later, he attempts to humiliate his boss by changing Ammer's size and shape during a presentation, but nobody can see it besides Michael. Worst of all, Michael goes back in time to relive the last time he saw his father, when he was too absorbed in his work to see him out the door one final time. As his father leaves his office for the last time, a remorseful modern-day Michael hits pause to look at dad and tell him that he loves him. He rewinds the scene and does it again. He rewinds the scene and does it again. He rewinds the...WAIT A SECOND. THAT THING HAS A REWIND BUTTON? Can't he just rewind back to the time before he made his first remote-related decision? Can't he just...oh, never mind.

In the end, Michael figures out a way to start over and, this time, he pledges to appreciate the things he has in life. He tells his boss he's not going to work on July 4, which means he's never going to make partner. Which means he'll live the agonizingly frustrating life of a middle manager long enough to come to resent his family for taking him away from the passion he felt for his work. He is going to end up hating his wife so hard. No matter how you look at it, they're going to get divorced anyway.

Told you it was sad.

Recommendation: I'd say fast forward to the last thirty minutes, but I'm TERRIFIED OF MY REMOTE CONTROL.

Because I Said So (2007)

Because I Said So features a trio of likable actresses (and Piper Perabo), all of whom are written so badly they practically scream the material in a dead-end effort to make it funny. Boy, does that not work. Instead, Diane Keaton, Mandy Moore, and Lauren Graham spend 102 minutes yelling at each other, yelling at their husbands, yelling at their colleagues, and yelling. When Diane Keaton's character suddenly gets laryngitis, you're hard-pressed to believe it isn't from all of the screenplay-mandated yelling. Amazingly, her inability to speak a word still manages to yield one of the worst scenes in the film.

In Because I Said So, Diane Keaton plays Daphne, a horrendous sociopath nightmare of a mother who the movie thinks it is depicting as slightly, endearingly overbearing. Daphne has raised three successful, independent daughters all on her own, and one would expect her to feel some pride for these whomen who grew up to be 1) a psychologist, 2) a business-owner of a catering company, and 3) Piper Perabo. After all, two out of three ain't bad. Instead, she seems to exist in a century where a woman's sole purpose in life is to meet a man and get married, and to fall anywhere short of that goal means utter, abject failure for mother and daughter alike.

Daphne places a personal ad in which she intends to find the man of her dreams for her daughter, Milly (Moore). The moment this plan is set into motion, you can literally chart out the progress of the rest of the film: Daphne meets a guy she likes for Milly and a guy she doesn't like for Milly, both guys meet Milly, Milly takes to the charming musician over the stable rich guy, rich guy disappoints her, musician guy gets upset that Milly was dating two guys at once, Milly discovers her mother placed the ad, Milly gets mad, Milly wins musician guy back and grows even closer with her mother at the end. And Diane Keaton starts dating the dad from 7th Heaven. Actually, you're forgiven if you didn't call that last one.

And yet, mysteriously, no one ever tells Daphne to get out of their lives and drop dead. Daphne involves herself in the lives of her daughters to a dangerously unhealthy extent, and even when they tell her to back off, it's in a gentle, charming way that says, "Mom, we know your life has been tough, and we appreciate how you raised us as a single mother, but now you need to let us live our lives and make our own mistakes." Even more frequently, the girls thank their mother for this fever pitch of meddlesome behavior, and Milly goes so far as to take her mother in after Daphne comes down with a case of laryngitis, just so they can be confined to one place long enough to bond over orgasms (I'm not making this up).

Great actors can elevate slight material, and even the worst of scripts can be rescued by a transcendent performance. And elevating slight material is exactly what Diane Keaton does NOT do in her performance as Daphne. Such a monster of a character would be a difficult feat for anyone to pull of, but Keaton goes to her "I was adorable in the 70s" bag of tricks and pulls out the same quirky outfits she was wearing when she played Annie Hall. But these flowers and stripes and hats and pantsuits don't play in the new millennium, especially when she's asking us to take her seriously as an older, more distinguished actress. Everyone in the world wants to like Diane Keaton, and like Diane Lane in the equally atrocious Under the Tuscan Sun, the movie simply won't let us. Instead, it makes her spend the entire movie just carrying around cakes (not in boxes, across beaches and other gross outdoor locations), for no reason that is immediately obvious to the viewer.

The other characters don't make out any better. By far the most egregious scene in the movie belongs to Lauren Graham's Maggie. Graham plays a psychologist who, when faced with the need to give her codependent sister advice, tells her suicidal patient (poor Tony Hale) that she has to reschedule him. When he protests and announces that he is actually going to kill himself, Milly opens the window to Maggie's office and screams at Tony Hale that Maggie has been telling Milly for ten years that he's been threatening to kill himself, and if he's that serious about it he should just go ahead and jump out. I hope Daphne is as tenacious at finding jobs for her daughters as she is at finding men, because Maggie should have had her license revoked years ago for these Gothika-level ethical violations. Then again, it's no wonder these girls turned out so deranged. Just look at their mother.

Recommendation: If ever required to watch this movie, leap out the window Milly so helpfully opened.

Stomp the Yard (2007)

Just in case you haven't seen enough movies about how dancing can change the lives of troubled kids. There is one reason and one reason alone we gave this movie a chance, and it is called Stick It. Stick It is about gymnastics but it's the same concept, except for the part where Stick It rules and Stomp the Yard sucks.

It starts with some guy named DJ whose best friend (or brother, I'm not sure) is killed in some gang violence. He is sent to live with his rich aunt and uncle, which is quite a shock for DJ as he is used to a gritty urban setting. At this point we realized, "Isn't this The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?" The answer is yes, but with added melodrama and no jokes and more importantly NO GEOFFREY. Talk about a recipe for failure.

Stomp the Yard is also full of needless shaky-cam, but from what I could make out DJ is a total douchebag. He gets a scholarship to this great university and immediately starts shoving people out of the way so he can talk to some girl drinking water in slow motion, like if she was hydrating at 24 fps would he still be stalking her? DJ spends a lot of time rudely shoving people out of the way to reach her, including members of the "step" team, which... okay.

I will freely admit my ignorance here. This whole movie is based around "stepping" and I have no idea what that is, but it sure looked stupid to me. Nevertheless, it's pretty rude of DJ to barge through their performance while chasing this girl (her name is April), but he sure gets pissed off when they call him on it. You know why? Because he's an asshole. I was like, "Close call, lady! Drop out while you can! Stay away from this douchebag!"

Unfortunately, DJ stalks April relentlessly and I guess it's supposed to be cute or romantic. DJ follows her everywhere, tries chatting her up, gives her boyfriend dirty looks, etc. DJ sits next to her in the library and their conversation goes something like this:

DJ: Go out with me.
April: No.
DJ: Go out with me.
April: No!
DJ: Go out with me.
April: NO!
DJ: Go out with me.
April: Okay.

By the way, sitting in the library talking about the plot is the closest these kids ever come to actually attending class at this so-called university. Don't they have studying to do? Why are they dancing and arguing all the time? WHERE IS CARLTON?!

So even though April has a boyfriend who treats her just fine, she goes out with DJ and they end up getting hammered and making out on the dance floor. I can't even repsond to this because we're given no reason why these characters would ever get to this point, so for the film's sake I must assume it's some kind of hallucination.

At this point we had to stop the movie because it was too shitty even for us. I normally have a policy of never quitting a movie, to give it a fair chance, etc. But then I realized that life is short and if I kept watching Stomp the Yard it would be even shorter because I would jump off the balcony.

We even skipped ahead to see if any of the dance sequences were exciting or visually interesting in any way. And... no.

Recommendation: Watch the actual Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. That's just a good idea anyway -- what an awesome show.

Gothika (2003)

Math doesn't lie, and a full 15% of the nation's critics agreed there was something worth watching in Halle Berry's 2003 horror film, Gothika. Indeed, if you look beyond the hilarious dialogue, the exhausted horror movie tropes, and the sheer existence of Penelope Cruz, you may well discover the movie contains three whole scary moments:

1) The shot where Halle Berry's Miranda sees a girl on a dark road, gets out of her car to help, and awakens after four lost days to find herself committed to a mental institution.
2) The shot where a now crazy Miranda sees the girl from the highway for the first time after becoming crazy.
3) Penelope Cruz's brokedown face.

The other 97 minutes of Gothika do not fare quite as well.

The terrible premise: Halle Berry plays Dr. Miranda Grey, a no-nonsense psychologist who works in a mental institution that resembles an underground bondage club from the not-too-distant future. When we first pop in on Dr. Grey, she is counseling Chloe (Cruz), a patient so around-the-bend crazy she utters lines such as "You know about my stepfather. You know I cut his throat. I cut his Adam's apple in half, like a piece of fruit on a summer day, so he wouldn't say a word. I sat next to him and watched him die... slowly." After the session, Miranda walks around the building and professionally gives orders to underlings, striding confidently down the halls of the asylum. In fact, she spends approximately eight out of the film's first ten minutes just walking. Walking competently like a true mental health professional, mind you. But still, just walking. This might have been as good a time as any for the closing credits to roll.

Though Chloe's blatant admission of murder is never retracted, she is still let go at the end of the film (spoiler!). We mention this strange plot development at this point to highlight the fact that releasing a psychopath onto the streets is still, somehow, not the institution's most egregious ethical lapse. Gothika drops into farce way earlier than that, when Miranda becomes a patient at the asylum in which she had only days before been a doctor, and her former colleagues (including Robert Downey Jr., who seems to have wandered around the set holding a coffee cup until someone finally decided to put him in the movie) become her doctors.

Miranda experiences a few moments of clarity, during which she attempts to tell the doctors she isn't as crazy as she seems, that there really WAS a scary girl in the road who now possesses her. But, as Chloe warns her, "The more you try to prove them wrong, the crazier you appear." When Miranda finds a framed photograph of the girl and rants that this is the girl who stood in front of her car that night on the dark road, she is told in no uncertain terms that she could not have seen that girl. No way. Not that girl. Not on that road. Not on that night. Not possible. Can you guess why? The movie tells us in one thuddingly non-spine-tingling line: "She's dead." If you couldn't see that one coming, you too may be crazy.

Ultimately, the movie descends into one cheap scare tactic which stops working after the first time you see it. Every time the music gets scary and the lights grow dim, Miranda is once again startled by... the same dead girl, over and over again. Boo. But of course, in the end, our heroine convinces the world that she's not crazy at all and that ghosts came into our dimension and made contact with the living just so they could tell her that Charles S. Dutton is a bad guy. Or something. As the credits roll, we all walk away learning that the crazy people are really the normal ones after all. And it would be a valuable lesson the filmmakers spent $40 million teaching us, had we not already learned it during season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Gothika stands as the worst crime three Oscar nominees in one movie could perpetrate on the filmgoing public. At least until we get around to screening All the King's Men.

Recommendation: Watch the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes.