Underworld: Evolution

January 22, 2006 | Leave a Comment

With a decent special effects budget and Kate Beckinsale I was hoping for the best, but the pre-show buzz made me think this was gonna be another Bloodrayne. I’m happy to report that Underworld: Evolution was much better than expected.

Evolution picks up right where Underworld left off, so close in fact that it seems like parts may have been filmed at the same time. If you haven’t seen Underworld then you NEED to see it first or you’re gonna be confused during the entire show. In addition, a general knowledge of modern popular vampire/lycan myth would be helpful (Anne Rice, Laurell Hamilton, Kelly Armstrong, etc.) You don’t need to know all this to enjoy the movie, but you’ll find yourself shaking your head a little less often.

Selene (Beckinsale) and Michael (Speedman) are running for the lives. Having just killed Viktor they are certain they will be hunted down and slaughtered. Turns out they have bigger problems… Marcus is awake, and he wants something from each of them. Seems that his brother William was the very first Lycan and in a deal made centuries earlier with Viktor he’s been imprisoned alone for the safety of humankind. OK, there’s more to it than that, but if none of that makes sense you really need to go watch the first movie.

The special effects are quite good, better than I expected in fact. Sure, some of the werewolf transformations looked straight out of An American Werewolf in London, but they were still cool to watch. And damn is it violent! Ripping off someone’s jawbone is a very effective way of pissing them off! And Kate… oh Kate. She looks SO fine in that rubber suit of hers. She does get naked this time around but we don’t get to see any of the fun parts. There are other ladies though…

Let’s review. Story… good, complex, entertaining. Acting… quite good, better than expected. Effects… better than average with lots of blood. Babes… Kate is smokin’ hot and there’s bonus vampire babes as well. Direction… no slow spots, kept me entertained.

The final result is 4 stars. Underworld: Evolution is better than its predecessor in every way and deserves to be seen on the big screen.

The Aristocrats

January 18, 2006 | Leave a Comment

So this guy walks into a talent scout’s office and says, “Boy, have I ever got a great act for YOU!”

Thus starts the nastiest, most revolting, most offensive, taboo-shredding joke that you’ve likely *never* heard. The joke, by all accounts, got its start back in the days of Vaudeville and has been passed down to the subsequent generations of performers/comedians and they ALL know it well. So why haven’t you heard it before? Quite simply, nobody ever tells this joke to an audience. Nobody. Well, except for Gilbert Gottfried who must have nards the size steroid-infused grapefruits…but I’ll get to that later.

You could come up with several reasons why they do not tell this joke to audiences but there really are only two reasons of any importance. Firstly, comedians don’t really tell jokes anymore. They relate observations or go on funny rants, but never actually tell a joke. Secondly, most audiences couldn’t handle this joke. Even with an audience prepared for vulgarity (like an audience for Richard Pryor or Andrew Dice Clay, for instance), they would be seriously blindsided by this joke and some would likely walk out. Not good for business.

So what’s the point of it all? You learn from the people in this documentary that this joke is used, primarily, as a tool for comedians to impress and entertain one another. After the crowd has gone home and the comics are sitting around in the green room sippin’ on a few drinks, they break out this joke and do their best to impress and/or outdo everyone else with it. They can do this because the joke itself can be told any way you want to tell it as long as the beginning and the punchline remain the same. Everything in between is fair game.

The heart of the joke is the man telling the talent agent about the act that he and his family perform on stage. I really have to be careful about how I word things here, but I’ll try to skirt around the worst of it. The act, as described, is absolutely horrific. No, not in a Liza-Minelli-breakdances-while-screeching-old-Buddy-Holly-tunes kind of way, but in a truly repugnant, rapid-fire regurgitation of unnatural acts kind of way. And when I use the term ‘unnatural,’ please understand that I’m being very kind.

I knew a little about the content of this movie before I walked in and I had wondered how they would keep it interesting and/or funny. I mean, how many times in a row can you hear the same joke and still laugh? This was NOT a problem at all. You only get a few tellings of the whole thing and those that you get are ALL quite spectacular in their own right.

Among the notables would be: Bob Saget (yes, *that* Bob Saget) who demonstrates that he is the filthiest, most perverted comic in the business today. His version of the joke cannot in any way be described here lest I make several FBI watch lists. Then there was Gilbert Gottfriend. While performing at the Fryer’s Club roast of Hugh Hefner three weeks after 9/11, he had the audacity to make a couple jokes about planes hitting buildings. As you might imagine, he got booed a bit. So he takes off the gloves and starts telling this joke. In what is quite possibly the only documented evidence of this joke ever being told to an audience, Gilbert becomes a legend. The camera pans over to the other comics and they are stunned. Rob Schneider is literally in the floor, doubled over with laughter just at the idea that he’s telling this joke. If this show ever aired on Comedy Central, I’m sure Gilbert’s time was just one looonnng bleep. Then there was Kevin Pollak who does his impersonation of Christopher Walken telling this joke. This alone would be worth the price of admission.

The rest of the time is spent getting to know this joke and what makes it tick; getting to know the history of it, what makes it funny, why it is great as a cultural taboo marker, etc. This is where my only possible criticism would come, however. Just by the fact you get so many people offering their own variations or advice about the joke, some are bound to strike you as not very funny. Such is life. However, the vast majority of these little moments are quite hilarious in their own right so there will be no star deducted for this.

The big shame here (besides my own shame at laughing in several of the worst places) is that this movie will be very hard to find in theaters. The fatal problem here is that it is unrated and some theater chains have explicitly stated that they absolutely won’t touch this movie with a ten-foot pole because they know that if it WERE given a rating by the MPAA, it would have to be NC-17. This is pretty much because the MPAA doesn’t *have* a more extreme rating.

It is scheduled to go into limited nationwide release on August 12th, but don’t be surprised if you can’t find it anywhere near you. If this is the case, be sure to keep it on your DVD release radar as you’ll not want to miss it.

Fun with Dick & Jane

January 11, 2006 | Leave a Comment

January is a great time of year to go see a movie. I say that because this is when you *know* that every new release in the theaters is gonna suck at least a little bit so you can walk into the theater with the lowest of expectations and know that you won’t be disappointed. And sometimes you may even be pleasantly surprised.

Such was the case with Fun with Dick & Jane. I was all set for this movie to give me one or two laughs and then bore me to death. Instead, however, I got several decent laughs from this Jim “Going through the motions” Carrey vehicle. This is still far from being a great movie, though.

Fun with Dick & Jane is a remake of a 1977 flick by the same name starring George Segal and Jane “I’m a traitor” Fonda. And, to be honest, the original didn’t need to be remade. It was an ‘ok’ comedy back then and this new one is similary just ‘ok’. The story is pretty simple: Dick & Jane Harper are living the good life and are upwardly mobile. Dick has just gotten a great new promotion which has allowed Jane to quit her job and stay home with their kid. But when Dick’s company pulls an Enron, Dick is out of a job along with 4,000 other high-paid white collar workers.

They struggle along for a bit until all the money and the job leads run out. Faced with destitution and eviction from their home, they turn to crime to pay their bills. This is where most of the comedy comes in and (thankfully) the movie picks the pace up a bit. But then, toward the end, they take a detour and attempt to gain revenge upon the person responsible for their misery and the movie again bogs down.

It’s a bad sign when, in a 90 minute movie, you find yourself checking your watch more than once. But don’t be too dismayed. The funny parts are funny enough to help offset some of the slow areas and you probably won’t feel like you got ripped off if you see this in the theater. But you likely won’t want to see it twice.

Wedding Crashers

January 3, 2006 | Leave a Comment

I didn’t go into this movie expecting much, but Wedding Crashers may just be the sleeper hit of the summer.

John (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy (Vince Vaughn) make their living as mediators in difficult divorce cases. When the spouses are yelling at each other about who gets the frequent flyer miles, these two manage to talk some sense into them and get the case resolved. The side effect of this is that they are really good at talking utter crap to get people to do what they want, especially women. This fits in perfectly with their hobby of crashing weddings.

Where most guys see weddings as horribly boring events that require us to change into clean socks, John and Jeremy see an opportunity to score free food and drinks. They also score a little something extra with the bridesmaids who have themselves all worked up over the ceremony. While I still couldn’t put up with the clean socks, I can certainly understand the lure of free… stuff.

Things are going great, the boys are scoring and having a great time until John falls for one of the bridesmaids. Now here’s where I expected the movie to turn into a chick-flick, I’d start yawning and just count the minutes till the inevitable happy ending. Surprisingly enough, that didn’t happen. Instead the writers ramped up the humor even more (and I’d been laughing out loud quite a bit up till this point) and kept the romance down to a tolerable level.

All the expected romantic-comedy queues are here… getting the family to like you, telling the girl you lied, getting into a fight with your best friend, and so on, but it’s done so well that I just didn’t care. I could run through a really long list but that would end up giving away the entire plot, but just think to yourself about the various possibilities that could happen when 2 guys hook up with sisters (one of which is a bit nuts) and go off for a weekend with the whole family that consists of a powerful dad, a horny wife, a jealous boyfriend and a gay brother. Most of what you just thought of is in the movie.

It did slow down some near the end as they had to wrap up the romantic stuff for the ladies, and as funny as the wedding crashes were, we did see a lot of them for the first hour of the movie. In the end the movie was just a bit too slow to get a 5 star rating, but it easily earned 4. Trim off 15 minutes worth and it might have been perfect.

Munich

January 1, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Munich is a film based loosely on a book by George Jonas called ‘Revenge’, which tells us what is believed to be an accurate account of Israels retaliation for the death of 11 of their athletes at the hands of a Palastenian terrorist cell. I can’t speak on the validity of the story but I can say it makes for a pretty solid movie.

The entire story surrounds around a young Mossad (Isreali Intelligence) agent named Avner played very, very well by Bana I might add, and his special mission to avenge the death of the slaughtered Olympic athletes. Avner is recruited by Ephraim (Rush) and then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meier to lead a team of specialists in the removal of several Black September agents and any sympathizers that get in their way. Avner gathers a group of dedicated soldiers all with different skills and areas of expertise (sounds a lot like Mission Impossible but it isn’t) and they set off across Europe to do what has to be done.

Daniel Craig as the hard liner vengeance is mine ’shooter’ and Ciarin Hinds as the cleaner are absolutely incredible, and the two of them alone make the movie even better than I expected. The action is fast paced when it needs to be and the dramatic pauses are top notch Spielberg at his best, combine that with superior acting and ask yourself… How could I possibly give this movie only 3 out of 5 stars? Well that answer is simple; Munich is all about the regret of doing what everyone knows needs to be done regardless of the circumstances. Take the actual events of the Munich games in 1972 and you know someone/anyone who was responsible for this travesty must pay. Now, add in the guilt of being a human being first and Isaeli seeking vengeance second and you get the reason it gets only 3 stars.

Whether or not the guilt and ultimate remorse Avner feels is justified is inconsequential to the fact that Mossad although deliberate in their actions, are justified in punishing the guilty. The overall theme of Munich is nothing more than an introspective into your belief on revenge. It makes you ask yourself, how much blood and death will even the scales. You believe you are right and so do they, so if the person or group that wrongs you believes whole heartedly in their actions how many of them dying or dead will make your pain go away or make them see you perspective? Spielberg asks those questions all the while reminding us Mossad are the good guys and Black September are the bad guys but the guilt felt by both sides is equal. This works for some it didn’t work for me!

I don’t like to be preached at when I watch a movie so I had to ding it for that but the story is good, the direction is excellent and if you have about 3 hours to dedicate to some serious internal evaluation see this movie but be prepared to be pissed off no matter which side of the coin you believe is the right one.