holy shit.

hamlet 2 is the funniest damn thing i’ve seen in years. and i watch a lot of movies.

first: the first part is todd-solondz-funny-uncomfortable (acid is a very powerful drug).

and b: the second part is piss-your-pants-laughing-funny (where are my pants… and underwear?).

steve coogan: brilliance.

oh, and jeff - nyagha nyagha!

looks like hollywood is up to its usual brain-dead imitation hijinks. college has already been done: it was called PCU, and had jeremy piven. PCU is the superior movie - because it had jeremy piven. (no, i haven’t seen college. but trust me on this. jeremy piven, like tiger balm, makes everything better. and no, that isn’t a strange comparison. i’m sure jeremy piven would feel great rubbed into my back and thighs. because they’re sore from workouts. right.)

and now i see a new flick coming over the horizon: sex drive. the blurb i received describes it thusly:

Loveable underdog IAN (Josh Zuckerman) is the last American virgin. At least that’s how it feels to him now that he’s 18, about to go to college, and losing girls to his 14-year-old brother. Ian’s always been the nice guy, the best friend … never the boyfriend. But his luck finally seems to be changing when he meets DANIELLE. She’s everything he’s ever wanted in a girlfriend – fun, sexy, and she really likes him. There’s just one problem. She lives in Knoxville . And he lives in Chicago . And she thinks he’s the Brad Pitt-lookalike he’s pretending to be on Facebook. At the urging of his best friend, LANCE (Clark Duke), Ian decides to confront his fear of rejection when Danielle makes him the offer of a lifetime: “If you drive all the way for me, I’ll go all the way for you.”

In the spirit of such classics as AMERICAN PIE, THE SURE THING and SUPERBAD, this wild romp follows Ian, Lance and their third musketeer, the spunky and gorgeous tomboy, FELICIA (Amanda Crew), as they set out in Ian’s older brother’s beloved ’69 GTO. Despite many hilarious setbacks on the road, including a stop-off at an Amish rave (who knew the Amish could party?), Ian finally meets his dream girl … but things don’t turn out quite as planned. Along the way, Ian discovers that while he’s prepared to go the distance for sex, there might be something even better a little closer to home.

apparently “in the spirit of” now means “blatantly ripping off.” the sure thing was a thing of beauty (and not just in a pre-plastic-surgery-nicollette-sheridan kind of way). and john cusack. brilliance. (john cusack and jeremy piven have apparently been in 10 movies together, but perfection was really attained only in the brief shining moment of grosse pointe blank.)

i honestly can’t think of anything worse than an american pie/the sure thing mashup.

wait, yes, i can. the intersection between bacon-flavored dental floss and personal lube.

it pretty much had to be. opening night tickets sold out nearly a month in advance. biggest opening ever. on its way to knock titanic off its pedestal. and todd seavey, whose movie tastes i usually find quite reliable, gushed in an email that it was the best superhero movie ever.

the dark knight nearly put me to sleep.

at least, the first half did. things picked up once the poorly-written girlfriend was out of the picture, and blue-screen magic made half of aaron eckhart’s head look like the mummy. but overall, i found it dull. pointless (although it was much improved by the joker’s declaration that that pretty much was the point). maybe i’m hopelessly dim, and i needed it explained to me. but just over an hour into it, i could’ve happily left the theater and not had more than a passing thought for what i missed.

so it’s a good thing i didn’t - because it’s a great second half. it’s the reverse of the problem with full metal jacket¹ - as though the writers had a great denouement, but couldn’t figure out how to get there. and it’s uneven: besides dragging whenever heath ledger is off-camera (and i’m not just saying this because i think he was dreamy²), one key chase sequence³ in the movie was so poorly conceived as to be laughable. it stands out all the more glaringly because the rest is pretty tightly written.

i’m thinking this is just a bad superhero season for my tastes. other than iron man (which i’ve seen twice in the theater), i could easily have waited for the dvds (for the incredible hulk, hellboy 2 and the dark knight).

UPDATE:

because i amuse myself, i am editing this to include some of my email comments to todd, who compared my lack of enthusiasm for the dark knight to my similar lack of enthusiasm for the first LOTR movie. warning: minor plot spoiler included.

was i the only one hoping that the joker was lying about how the ferries were wired, so that each was holding its own detonator? and then, when the big con threw the detonator out the window, was i the only one hoping the smarmy suit would blow the ferry full of “innocents” sky high?

as far as billionaire industrialist playboys go, i think i’d take downey’s stark over bale’s wayne. with stark you get the feeling he’s having fun; with wayne it’s just another mask he has to wear. and oh, the weight of it all.

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¹ namely, great first half, terrible second half. a fantastic set up with nowhere to go.
² oh, but he was. have you seen 10 things i hate about you?
³ if you’ve seen the movie, you should know what i’m talking about. if you haven’t, i’m not going to spoil the details for you.

james and i went to see the 25th anniversary showing of wargames last night. unfortunately the print hasn’t been remastered and all the reds are faded to hell (i think the opening credits were redone, as they appeared in a jarring arterial blood) leaving behind a much drearier blue-gray world than i remember.

despite the overall image quality, all was fine until the screen inexplicably went dark (right about the time the kids were fleeing helicopters at falken’s¹ goose island getaway), and the movie was replaced by the windows status bar you see above. (apologies for the image quality; the iphone isn’t the greatest at low-light photography.) apparently the flick was being streamed via satellite from cali, and they experienced a total systems failure.²

joshua never would’ve let that happen. he would’ve called back.
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¹ mildly amusing: someone set up a stephen falken myspace page. slightly more amusing: a 1990 overview of wargames in the journal “teaching sociology.”

² although we were told by the theater manager that the outage was nationwide, apparently those who were watching at tyson’s got to see the whole flick (albeit in subpar conditions), while at least one other theater - in indiana - also lost the feed.

some low-level hilarity ensued in the theater, as everyone took the malfunction with surprising good grace (or perhaps not so surprising: the theater was at maybe quarter capacity, and the audience comprised of thirtysomething technogeeks taking in a vintage flick at 7:30 on a thursday night.) there weren’t even too many groans about the technological errors in the movie, such as when lightman pulled the cord out of his phone and watched the game timer continue to count down on his monitor. and we did get 2 free tickets each as consolation, which was good.

james’ comment: “too bad no one has the movie on their ipod.”

the breakfast club on thursday at 7pm, or
better off dead on friday at 9:30pm (possibly saturday at 9:45) or
a midnight showing of the thing on friday, august 8, or
videodrome at 11:30 on the following friday, or
damnit, i’m going to be at burning man when they show aliens.

*sigh* bless you, AFI. a smorgasboard of positively fantastic options to make this former BFS programmer’s¹ heart sing.

hat tip: james
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¹ damn. gotta tell ya, the bfs loses something with such a nice, neat, online presence. i miss the cut’n'glue-stick film bulletin. i miss todd’s reviews.

if you liked pan’s labyrinth, you’ll probably love hellboy ii.

i didn’t like pan’s labyrinth - in between the exceedingly well-done, nerve-wracking and gut-wrenching scenes from the spanish civil war were long, boring, interminable bouts of really dull “magical” realism. don’t get me wrong - i like magical realism. of garcia marquez’ variety, anyway. del toro’s, OTOH, is a real snoozer. perhaps literally - there’s nothing in his movies that i haven’t seen in my dreams. (not my nightmares, mind you. those are usually terrifying hallucinations involving having forgotten my locker combination and not knowing where my next class is.)

so yeah, given i find del toro’s fantastical world of displaced-eye creatures (the funky eyes-in-hands creature from pan’s labyrinth becomes a funky eyes-in-wings creature in hellboy ii) and kitten-snacking trolls (did the old lady play poker with clem and spike?) completely boring, i was ready to leave hellboy ii about halfway through. the story is alternately incoherent and obvious, and filming action sequences really isn’t del toro’s forte. i totally lost interest in the movie. i started twittering. i considered filing my nails. i would’ve gone to sleep if the soundtrack hadn’t been so loud.

which isn’t to say i found it completely unredeemable. in the midst of tooth fairies, fish vendors, giant juggernauts, legless ogre smiths, forest elementals and big gold tick-tock men, what weirded me out the most was that the elf prince bore an uncanny resemblance to tom cruise. a crazed, albino tom cruise.

i can only hope del toro doesn’t write or direct the inevitable sequel.

what can i say? he was jks’ film TA. and then there’s that small matter of absolutely amazing everything.

oh, yeah. and neil patrick harris.

guillermo del toro’s elves look an awful lot like elric of melnibone:

and wall-e is a dead ringer for an infantilized johnny 5:

heh. heh heh. heh heh heh.

wanted is awesome.

it’s not a great flick, mind you. it’s ridiculous, absurd, over the top, and has a plot a mole rat could decipher. it runs long and gets redundant. it owes a whole lot to fight club and the fast and the furious.

but it doesn’t try to get all pseudo-deep, introspective and meaningful, like ultraviolet did.

and it’s hella fun to watch.

question for ed norton: if your bruce banner is reasonably conversant in spanish, why is his portuguese so abysmal after living in rio for several months? is it because he’s trying to learn the language from sesame street muppets and dubbed episodes of the courtship of eddie’s father?

even suspending my disbelief to accept an oddly peaceful rocinha (with a tremendous opening aerial shot that almost looks like a model), liv tyler as a university professor (albeit showing uncommon good taste in dating a psychiatrist), and bill hurt’s baggy class As (i’m thinking he didn’t like the regulation stiff polyester pants) wasn’t enough to make me like the movie. oh, i enjoyed the incredible hulk well enough during its hefty 114 minute run time, but less than 48 hours later i can’t really think of anything memorable about the flick.

fanbois seem to think it’s better than ang lee’s 2003 version, and maybe it’s just that i prefer jennifer connolly to liv tyler (let’s face it, while her high point may have been labyrinth - okay, maybe a beautiful mind - she still shows more range in a yawn than tyler does watching her long lost love get pelted by mortar fire at her father’s direction), but i don’t see the improvement. ed norton is good, but then, he’s always good, and gives a workmanlike rendition of banner that does little to shed light on banner’s inner conflict and less to explain why he’s still enamored of tyler’s betty ross.

i should probably mention tim roth, though, because he’s great as the increasingly unstable emil blonsky. in a fan-friendly backstory move, hurt’s character (evil not-quite-genius general ross) spends several minutes explaining to blonsky the genesis of the project that resulted in banner/hulk before repeating his hubris on blonsky’s willing (and unfortunately british) bare bod. blonksy digs the power (having happily informed us all he’d rather have a good fight than a promotion), seeks out more, and ends up all cgi-bump-and-spiky. there’s too much of him as the abomination and not enough as blonsky, but what we get is a gritty tooth-gnashing of a performance that leaves most of the scenery surprisingly unchewed.

but even roth can’t save the movie, and in the end, the most incredible thing was what rickson gracie can do with his stomach.