Ghost Rider: Wait, What the Crap Was That?A review, and public service announcement

Oh, I'm sorry, I thought I was watching a Nick Cage Movie, not trying to test my mental pain tolerance. Seriously, I want to cry. I will never get those 2 hours of my life back. I feel cheated out of time that would have otherwise been wasted anyway.

First of all, this movie was loaded chock full of stuff that I like. I like motorcycles. I like comic book/superhero movies as a general rule, especially the ones starring heroes that are a little bit bad. I like motorcycles. I like fire. I like motorcycles. Sometimes I like Nicholas Cage. I like Eva Mendes.


Oh yeah, Eva Mendes. Good times.

...

Anyway, Ghost Rider. I just don't know what to say. Somehow they took all that rad stuff and put it together into something terrible that I would like to light on fire and then pee on, but not until it's good and burned up, because otherwise it would just be a little bit charred and peed on, whereas my goal would be total eradication by fire. Plus, pee.

The whole time, I was hoping that all this badness was leading up to some sudden climax of awesomeness that would snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, but no, it ended up just a collection of nonsense plot points in between some nonsense fight scenes and a bunch of shit on fire.

I know I should be giving concrete examples instead of just saying it's bad in a lot of different ways, so I will, because I can imagine my English teacher telling me to, not that I paid a lot of attention to anything in that class except her hilarious British accent.

When our hero Johnny Blaze: Stunt Motorcyclist first turns into the Ghost Rider, he tears ass through town as a flaming skeleton on a flaming motorcycle, going so fast that everything near his path is lit on fire, thrown into the air, melted, or exploded by the shock wave. Then he kills a mugger, which is not at all relevant to my point. The next morning, the cops arrive to find a trail of destruction that could only be laid by a very angry atomic fire tornado earthquake. At the sight of this level of catastrophic wreckage, any normal human would be immediately rending their clothing and wondering where they might locate some sackcloth, ashes, and maybe some virgins to appease what is obviously a very very angry God, or possibly Chuck Norris. Instead, the investigating officer's response seems to be Huh. Looks like the town was laid to waste by some sort of unspeakably violent supernatural power...Hey look, a license plate. I bet it was that guy who jumps motorcycles over stuff! Whew, that was a tough one! So, apple fritter or bear claw?

And it actually gets stupider from that point on, I kid you not. The specifics would make you annoyed, and probably a little bit stupider.


But it's all worth it in the end if I manage to prevent you from letting this movie kick your brain right in the balls. That's my public service to the world, and you're welcome. All I ask is that you use your turn signals once in a while, jackass. Is that too much to ask? Is it?

Review: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

Well, I just got back from seeing 3 Fast 3 Furious 3 Tokyo 3 Drift, and I was pleasantly surprised that it didn't suck nearly at all.

I remember reading through the daily scripts when I was on set, thinking that some of the dialogue was just awful, the same caliber as most of Anakin Skywalker's lines in Star Wars Ep. 2 and 3, and I guess the editors agreed with me because they cut out most of the really awkward bits, including the big kiss at the end where, for complicated reasons, they had to use a photo double in Lucas Black's place. In the end, it still wasn't Shakespeare - hell, it wasn't Joss Whedon, but for a big dumb fast action movie about a nonsense racing style that actually gets you to the finish line slower than just driving normally, it worked well enough, and didn't cause me too much emotional or intestinal distress.

A few criticisms:

• The cellphone camera POV shots. Lame. What is this, a Verizon commercial?
• The credits went by way too quickly, and kept spinning around, so I was able to neither confirm nor deny that my name was listed under "Stunt Players".
• All the mid-race rapid cutting back and forth from Racer 1's face, Racer 2's face, and Racers 1 and 2's hands, wheels, etc. etc.. At moments, it made it hard to figure out exactly what the hell was going on. But maybe that's just me getting slow in my old age, and in a few months I'll be sitting on a porch swing with a shotgun across my lap yelling at passing kids to get off the damn lawn.

I liked it, though. Hell, I saw it get filmed, so it's not like I didn't know how the races were going to end, and some of the racing bits still had me on the edge of my seat, heart rate up, arthritis givin' me both barrels.

I give it seven out of ten Steve McQueens. I thought it may have been better than the first Furious movie, and was definitely better than the facepunchingly bad 2 Fast 2 Furious. By my usual rating system, I'd rate it 6 dollars, $6.50 if you can find a showing that's not filled with the loud teenage spiky-headed douchebags that seem to always love movies like this.


*SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH*
Also, that bit at the end with Vin Diesel? I had no idea that was going to happen, after being on set with first unit every single day they filmed in this country. Surprised the crap out of me, or maybe that's just me losing bowel control after all these years.
*END SPOILERS*

More random stuff to watch for:

• Near the beginning, right after Lucas gets off the plane, he's going up a long escalator. A few people back behind him, you can see a couple of airline pilots. One of them is Justin Lin, the director. If I recall correctly, the other one is Clayton Townsend, the executive producer.
• During the training montage at the docks, one of those old fisherman guys is Keiichi Tsuchiya, the real-life "Drift King". If you're not into the drifting scene, you don't know who he is. Don't worry about it, neither do I, but I guess he's kind of a big deal for the drifting crowd.
  
• After the movie, drive carefully back home. I guarantee the cops will be around the corner salivating at the thought of ticketing all the aforementioned spikey-headed douchebags who will be driving like complete asshats as soon as they get back in their cars. Not having rear-drive or any actual ability to drift will not stop them from trying to drift, trust me on this.

Review: First Daughter

First Daughter: It's pretty much just like Chasing Liberty, only with Katie Holmes instead of Mandy Moore. Normally, that would be a point in Daughter's favor, except the only thing Liberty had going for it was that Mandy Moore seems slutty enough that even I'd have a chance with her, so I could create elaborate fantasies involving Mandy, me, and a whole jar of chunky peanut butter and watch them play out on my head during the stupid parts of the film. That is to say, the parts between the previews and the credits. With First Daughter, I didn't even have that to keep me company, as Katie consistently rejects me, even in my imaginary happy land.

My rating for First Daughter: $1.

additional note: I swear to you that I did not pay to see Chasing Liberty. My mother lacks whatever sense that keeps most of the rest of us from renting obviously godawful movies. I love her dearly, but I no longer let her go to Blockbuster Video unaccompanied.

Now, to cheer you up, a kitty:



Awwww.

Double Feature Review: Princess Diaries 2 and Hidalgo

I just saw Princess Diaries 2, and then came home to find that someone had rented Hidalgo, and it was just starting, so I ended up watching it and right now I'm not liking movies very much.


The Princess Diaries was crap. It was such total cheese that I put my hat back on 10 minutes into the film to minimize the chances of being recognized, even though there were only 2 other people in the entire theatre. I actually cringed at a good number of lines in that movie, and truly felt sorry for Julie Andrews throughout the whole thing. It must have hurt, being in a movie like this after doing, say, the Sound of Music. Actually, forget The Sound of Music: it must have hurt being in a movie like this after doing The Princess Diaries 1.

The Princess Diaries 2 gets a rating of $2.00

The sappy factor had me walking out the theatre with a smile on my face, though, which is more than I can say for Hidalgo. Egads. I was checking my watch constantly, hoping this seemingly longer-then-the-3000-mile-race-it-depicts marathon of a film would end, so I could sleep, or eat something, or watch Jon Stewart fail to be funny about the Presidential election. We were rooting for Viggo to shoot the horse when it got injured, and then fell silent in defeat when it got back up and kept going. Hidalgo could have been made much shorter, if they had cut out all the-
No, scratch that. It could have been made the optimal length by not making it all.

In any case, knowing what I know now, you would have to pay me to see Hidalgo. At my current job's pay rate, that comes out to $33.43, plus $2 for gas.

I give Hidalgo, therefore, a rating of -$35.43

Review: Jenny McCarthy's Right Nipple

I know this isn' t a movie review, but some things just require me to speak out.

I touched Carmen Electra today on the set of Dirty Love, and saw a Jenny McCarthy nipple firsthand due to a minor wardrobe malfunction during a stage-diving scene. The one on the right.

I give Jenny McCarthy's right nipple a preliminary rating of $6.00, but I will reserve a final judgement for the day she shows me both of them at the same time, since it would be unfair to rate the one nipple out of context.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse: A Review

If you liked the first one, you'll like this. If you liked xXx, you'll probably like this. If you're looking for artsy crap or a totally coherent plot that someone spent more than an hour on, then I think you came into the wrong theatre.

Zombies get shot, stabbed, lit on fire, blown up, run over by cars, kicked in the face, and decapitated, mostly by Milla Jovovich. Breast are bared, if not for a great deal of time. Motorcycles are inexplicably jumped through windows, and it all makes sense, if you don't think about it too hard. If this was the Shawshank Redemption with Andy Dufrsne escaping by building a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy entirely out of soap and jumping it through a 2' square window with bars while the warden's head explodes from astonishment, I would feel rather violated, but this is a movie based on a computer game, so there's no need to set the bar very high.

My rating: $5.

Review: Before Sunset

I just saw Before Sunset, and then rushed home to warn you all.

It's 80 minutes of real-time dialogue between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. It's like someone took one of those long Clerks shots of just Dante and Randall talking about crap, stretched it out to an hour and twenty minutes, turned Randall into a French lady, and had them adlib all their lines, specifically instructing them to not be entertaining.

No, seriously, that's it. The whole time I kept expecting something to happen. Anything. Nothing happened. Nothing at all happened in this film apart from some extraordinarily dull conversation. I've had oil changes more film-worthy.

My rating: -$7. They should have paid me to watch this. That shit was hard work.

Update: I have been informed that this fim is a sequel to the 1995 movie Before Sunrise. I have now watched the first film's trailer, and thus am fully qualified to change my rating to...wait, no, it's still crap.