The Venture Bros.: Seasons 1&2
February 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment
This is an animated series from the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim.
It’s a spoof of the 1960s animated series JONNY QUEST, but it spoofs a lot of superhero comics, boys action-adventure series, etc.
The Venture Brothers are Hank and Dean Venture. Their dad, Dr. Thaddeus “Rusty” Venture, is a super-scientist. They live in his laboratory/headquarters/compound with their bodyguard, Brock Samson.
Each episode they get into adventures, often due to the nemesis of Dr. Venture, arch-villain The Monarch, and his many henchman.
Several writers of this worked on THE TICK, and it has that feel, but with more sexual innuendo and more fart jokes.
Several episodes spoof The Fantastic Four (The Visible Woman can only make her skin become invisible, leaving muscles and veins like one of those old plastic anatomical models).
Various sometimes-villains-sometimes-allies show up, like Russian femme fatale Molotov Cocktease.
In one episode, Dr. Venture has a yard sale to clear out some of the junk his father (also a super-scientist) accumulated. All the super-villains show up, hoping to buy super-weapons at low low low prices.
This is funny stuff, highly recommended.
DVD features: Each season has 13 episodes (A third season is in the works). Bonus features on the DVDs include the pilot, a Christmas short, and various deleted scenes and mockumentary segments. The first season has 5 commentaries, the second season has commentaries for all 13 episodes. Unfortunately, the commentaries aren’t very good. That’s my one complaint about this DVD set; the creators make fun of the fact that they’re doing commentaries, taking time to answer their cell phones and whatnot. This would be funny a couple of times, but doing it every commentary is a waste; I’d be interested in actually seeing some detail on the creation process behind the show.
Popularity: 31% [?]
Be Kind Rewind
February 22, 2008 | 1 Comment
This movie is set in an impoverished neighborhood where two chuckleheads (Jack Black and Mos Def) work in a video store. The store can’t afford to upgrade to DVD, so the stock is still VHS. Jack Black becomes magnetized and accidentally erases every tape in the store.
When a patron (Mia Farrow) threatens to tell their boss (Danny Glover) unless they can hand her a videotape of GHOST BUSTERS by 5 PM, they take a video camera outside and shoot their own version. Needless to say, costumes, special effects, and production values leave a bit to be desired.
Then they shot another. And another. These homegrown versions become so popular with their patrons that they end up restocking their shelves with their own versions of movies like ROBOCOP, RUSH HOUR 2, DRIVING MISS DAISY, 2001, KING KONG, ROCKY, BOYZ IN THE HOOD, and THE LION KING.
This may appear at first glance to be a madcap Jack Black comedy, and the movie spoofs are funny, but the movie is really more of a Frank Capra-style fable. It’s kind of sweet.
Popularity: 27% [?]
Diary Of The Dead
February 15, 2008 | 2 Comments
The Zombie Apocalypse will be video-captured!
George Romero, king of the zombie movie, has made five zombie movies now: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978), DAY OF THE DEAD (1985), LAND OF THE DEAD (2005), and now DIARY OF THE DEAD.
They’re all in something of a floating continuity; they all depict aspects of a zombie apocalypse, but since they’re filmed decades apart it’s not really the same zombie apocalypse, it’s always as if the dead began rising from the grave just a short while ago.
This time around, like BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and CLOVERFIELD, it’s told from the point of view of people with video cameras documenting the whole thing. Thankfully, Romero keeps the shaky-cam/motion-sickness cam to a minimum. These people can hold a camera steady, even when being pursued by zombies.
The college students are making a low budget horror film, when suddenly they get the news that, unbelievably, there seems to be a world-wide zombie epidemic going on.
One of them has an RV camper (and why a college student would have one is never explained), but a group of them pile in and try to make it back to their hometowns. In route they encounter a lot of zombies, and one guy keeps filming it all, planning to make a documentary from his footage.
This is a lower-budget film than Romero’s last one (LAND OF THE DEAD), but it works. The zombie gore seems realistic, even through the documentary gimmick.
The cast of relative unknowns is sometimes a bit shaky in the acting department; but then again anyone with a camera trained on them during a disaster might come across as a bit artificial.
At one point we get to see how the Amish handle a zombie apocalypse (surprisingly well, all things considered)!
And woven throughout is a wry commentary on how we’ve become obsessed with documenting ourselves on video and posting it on the Internet.
Look for a cameo by Romero in the film; he plays a cop at a news conference.
Romero has had a lot of imitators lately in the zombie movie genre. The homage/comedy SHAWN OF THE DEAD, the fast zombies of the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake and 28 DAYS LATER/28 WEEKS LATER, and I AM LEGEND.
But Romero’s zombies still hold their own. Like the tortoise vs. the hare, his slow-moving zombies know that, at some point, you have to stop running to rest, and they draw inexorably closer.
(At last year’s DragonCon, George Romero was there, and he was selling t-shirts that proclaimed FAST ZOMBIES SUCK!)
Popularity: 26% [?]
Jumper
February 14, 2008 | 1 Comment
If you could have a superpower, what would it be?
Maybe invisibility. I’d like to be a Human Babel Fish; able to communicate in all languages. In JUMPER, the superpower is teleportation.
David (Hayden Christensen) discovers in high school he can *BAMF*, like that blue guy in X-MEN. He leaves home, steals money from bank vaults, sets himself up in a fancy apartment in New York City, then spends his days jumping from place to place, surfing in Fiji, seducing a woman in a bar in London, sunning himself atop the Sphinx in Egypt.
He eventually meets up with a Brit Jumper named Griffin. What little exposition there is comes from him, which is unfortunate, because he talks with such a mush-mouth. For example, we learn that Jumpers have been around for centuries, and there is an age-old group that hunts them called the Plabbleblabbles. Actually, they’re called the Paladins, but it took about the sixth time he said it for me to be able to understand what the heck he was saying.
Now, a regular movie of this ilk might have given us some scenes of them discovering an ancient temple with carvings on the wall of Paladins chasing Jumpers. Or maybe a Medieval illuminated manuscript. No time, this movie has to get to more quick cuts of Jumping. So we just get, “Some guys hunt us.”
The main guy hunting them is Samuel Jackson. He’s kind of like the guy he played in UNBREAKABLE. He’s jealous of people with a superpower, and so he’s going to try to kill them.
Frankly, the protagonist is so unlikeable, I was rooting for Samuel Jackson.
Extraordinarily, nobody involved has the slightest curiosity about why there are people who can teleport. There’s no attempt at any sort of technobabble. I’d at least have liked them to bring in some Heisenberg-type character and then he could draw some equations on a blackboard and say, “I’m uncertain, in principle!”
Rachel Bilson plays a love interest.
Diane Lane makes a brief appearance, and is lovely as always.
This movie has nice special effects, but that’s about it. A protagonist who’s distinctly unlikeable; his fellow Jumper who’s also not very likeable but at least is a bit of a smart-ass, but should learn to enunciate. There’s no sort of “with great power comes great responsibility” lesson here. They like Jumping, they like stealing stuff, and they think they’re entitled. And there’s a complete lack of any explanation of any of this.
Popularity: 27% [?]
Wild West Comedy Show
February 8, 2008 | 2 Comments
Or its full title: Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights from Hollywood to the Heartland.
Directed by Ari Sandel, this is a concert tour film with Vince Vaughn, and four up-and-coming comedians: Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, and Sebastian Maniscalco.
Stand-up comedy is not the industry it was in the 1980s. These comedians have been around for 10-15 years each, and some of them may be headlining one week and working as a waiter next week. Vince Vaughn organized this tour to give these four guys a showcase.
In 2005 they went on a month-long 6000-mile bus tour, which happened to coincide with Hurricanes Rita and Katrina.
Also appearing are some friends of Vince Vaughn such as Jon Favreau, Justin Long, and Peter Billingsley (Ralph from A CHRISTMAS STORY, all grown up).
The four comedians: Ahmed Ahmed is of Egyptian descent, and much of his humor comes from the “Really, I’m not a terrorist” vein. Sebastian Maniscalco is from Chicago. John Caparulo is a Midwestern Everyman. Bret Ernest is a Jersey boy.
These are funny, talented, rude comedians. When it shows them on stage, the film is hilarious.
But it only shows us snippets of their stage show, quickly cutting away to other things.
Unfortunately, way too much of the film depicts backstage and what it’s like to be on a tour bus slumber party with Vince Vaughn and these guys. The film greatly overestimates how interesting it is to spend time with these guys offstage. These parts of the film come across as SPINAL TAP… only not funny.
That they managed to hit 30 cities in 30 nights is an amazing feat, and that must have been the impetus to document it. This must have been a grueling tour. But seeing behind the curtain of this tour isn’t that interesting.
I’m still recommending this mildly, because these guys are funny. I just wish the film had a greater ratio of on-stage comedy to off-stage time.
Popularity: 25% [?]
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane
February 6, 2008 | 1 Comment
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane was supposed to be the big breakthrough film for one of the hottest comics of the 1980’s, Andrew Dice Clay. It was supposed to do for him what 48 Hours did for Eddie Murphy. However, the “Dice Man” was quite polarizing and loved to be surrounded by controversy including getting “banned for life” from MTV for language during one of their award shows. By 1990 when Ford Fairlane was released there were as many people who hated Clay passionately as there were who were rabid fans. This no doubt contributed to a lack of success at the box office as the movie only did a little over $20 million total.
Andrew Clay’s career went downhill after the release of Ford Fairlane perhaps due to all of the controversy. It’s easy to forget just how funny this character is, and Ford Fairlane captures The Diceman at his most sexist, politically incorrect best. No nasty nursery rhymes here, but when Ford wakes up with two hotties who upon realizing what/who they’ve done proclaim “But Ford, we just wanted to be held!”, he quickly answers “You got the bonus plan!”. In fact, many of sexist pigs who are fans of his work can pull an insane nmber of quotes from this movie.
But is the movie any good? Critics hated it, still do. We love it. It captures that time between the excess of the 80’s and the beginning of the whiney depressing grunge era of the early 90’s. And it makes fun of the music industry as part of the story. The plotline is simple, Ford is a famous private investigator in Los Angeles specializing in the music industry, he’s known far and wide as “the rock and roll detective”. He gets involved in a case surrounding the death of a rockstar. This is not an edge of the seat thriller, this is pure comedy with a dash of action. The story exists as a platform for The Diceman to do his thing.
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is one of those movies that you need to just check your brain at the door, sit back and enjoy. We give it a strong 4 stars. The studios were slow to release The Adventures of Ford Fairlane on DVD, but since they have, it has found a new life. It’s also typically a bargain, this one belongs in every guy movie collection.
Popularity: 31% [?]
Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Vol. 5
February 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Aqua Teen Hunger Force (or ATHF, for short) is one of those shows that I watched faithfully for the first couple of seasons but then lost track of. Thanks to the convenient use of DVDs, however, I’ve been able to catch up over time and, once again, a new DVD release is enabling me to catch back up with the rest of the ATHF faithful.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the show, it’s a little hard to explain. ATHF has three members: Frylock, Master Shake and Meatwad. Frylock, an enormous floating order of french fries, is the brains of the operation while Master Shake, a man-sized milk shake, is the deliquent and Meatwad, a rolling ball of…meat…is the ‘tard of the team. They *are* teens, but the “Aqua” part of the name is pretty much a complete red herring. As for being a “Hunger Force,” welllll…. not so much. They just hang out in New Jersey and make life miserable for their neighbor, Carl, as you can see from the picture here as he gets anally raped by a two-legged mutant dog named “Hand Banana”. Yes, its name is Hand Banana. All he knows is “ball!” and “good!” ….. and “rape!” But I digress…
The fifth season of ATHF has a lot of the things that made the show really cool. But it’s also missing some things, too. Gone are the Dr. Weird and Spacecataz openings. And there’s no MC Pee Pants! Ok, ok, I didn’t really miss MCPP. One thing I do miss, though, is the laid back tone of the first few seasons. It really seems like they’re trying too hard sometimes here in season 5. The bit with Tera Patrick eating a corn dog in the episode Grim Reaper Gutters was beyond lame. I mean, I’m all for porn stars eating phallic objects on camera, but they way it was done here just sucked…no pun intended.
Despite these criticisms, however, there is a lot of brilliance here which is as expected. Unlike the past seasons, however, the negatives come too close to negating the good stuff. The end result is a 3-star effort.
NOTE: The extras on this set are just deplorable. There’s a lot of them but they are pretty universally lame so just do yourself a favor and just skip them entirely.
Popularity: 31% [?]
Free Movie Monday 2/4/08
February 4, 2008 | 5 Comments
The Superbowl is over, the seemingly endless chatter from the Monday morning quarterbacks has ended, so it’s time to give away a movie!
We’ve added in Aqua Teen Hunger Force Vol. 5 so if you’re a fan, jump right on that. Otherwise the rest of the library is available for you to choose from. Same rules as usual, first eligible person to post in this thread saying what they want will get it.
Popularity: 27% [?]
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