Over and Out: Kino September '09

As stated in my previous post, I've very recently quit writing for The BEAST. In that post I explained that my last submission was indeed submitted but never published. I also mentioned how I would be posting what would've been my final voyage for said publication. Here it is in all its final glory. My only regret is not knowing it would be my last (kind of) submission...

Gamer

"Say the Spartans weren't homos or I'll cut you, bitch...!"

It's a point of professional pride with me, even before I turned half-assed professional as a film trailer critic, that I've never walked out of a movie. Even the highest piles of shit I've stood downwind from haven't wafted fumes I've not been able to endure. Granted, most piles I've sidestepped and have avoided the aroma altogether but I've always thugged up in the face of the cinematic stenches I've lacked the savvy to circumvent.

Then I saw the trailer for Gamer. Oh, the stench! If this movie had knuckles it would drag them on the ground while hoping to God that no one notices the pink banana hammock its donning underneath its camouflaged blood-stained battle gear. Calling the trailer for this movie an exercise in style over substance would be giving it a certain credibility, if only by using a sentence I spent more than 11 seconds thinking up to describe it. The trailer is a fucking seizure, an extended and prolonged spasm. The trailer for Gamer is a fat girl who finally got laid after 2 and a half years and has to tell everyone about it. Jiggling, cellulite dimples, sweat-filled folds, cum-filled bellybutton and all.

Gamer's trailer is a bad mix CD given to you by that moron you made the mistake of talking to the first week of your first semester of college. Community College, no less. This mix promises a bad, incohesive jumble of Death Race, the music of Marilyn Manson, video games taken to the next level, rappers trying to act and Dexter doing his best evil Katharine Hepburn impression. What else would you expect from a movie about death row inmates being physically manipulated into video game characters.

Gerard Butler plays the superstar prisoner/puppet. I'm guessing by the yellow and black label dialogue in the trailer that he's falsely imprisoned for the crime for which he was convicted because he's got a picture of a daughter he gets misty over. I'm guessing that all the inmates/players/whatever find a way to bust free and go after the mint julep-drinking, slipper-wearing southern dandy who masterminded this whole thing. And no, I'm not talking about either the movie's producers or directors. I'm talking about the movie's fruity, fruity villain.

If all of the admittedly low-grade venom I've spewed throughout this trailer's review doesn't give you any indication of how bad Gamer looks, let me put it this way--this movie looks so bad I'm surprised that Jason Statham isn't in it.

Extract

Featuring J.K. Simmons as Smart-Assed Turtle Man

When Mike Judge pissed in the face and shit in the mouth of corporate America with his 2006 comic masterpiece Idiocracy it was pretty much assumed he'd never make another movie ever again and the future highlight of his career would entail being a talking head on VH-1's I Love the... Whatevers. Then came the trailer for Extract which boasted that not only was Judge alive and well, but thankfully still working.

This time out, Judge has Jason Bateman as the owner of an herbal remedy factory about to lose his shit because of a workplace full of dumbasses and a shrewish, yet passive-aggressive wife who won't put out. But fortunately there's a foxy new temp played by the annoying but hot chick from That 70s Show making things more interesting on the job and Bateman's wastecase buddy, played by an unrecognizable Ben Affleck is present and doling out bad advice.

Extract looks like everything you'd expect from a Mike Judge movie. It looks awesome to the point of taking what promises to be a hysterical Ben Affleck to and beyond the status of tolerable, but also making you forget he ever had anything to do with Jennifer Lopez and her overgrown ass of questionable heritage and origin. And I think its safe to day that everyone's looking for an excuse to forgive Affleck for Gigli. Or at least forget Gigli.

Carriers

"Yeah, yeah. I know. You're a doctor, not a... wait a minute!"

Anyone who reads this column with any regularity or consistency knows if there's one thing that makes my pants dance its a good post-apocalyptic freakshow. The more realistic the better. Zombies are preferrable, but if you can't pull the undead into it give me a fast and nasty virus. And that's what the trailer for Carriers seems to be offering. A 28 Days Later-esque biohazard filled, end of the world survival tale that seems to be turning into the next big thing. Post-apocalyptic movies seem to be to the last couple years what the word millennium was to the year 1999.

Carriers boasts the only thing more dangerous than the disease are the carriers as we see the decisive hardass who played Captain Kirk driving around with greasy, sweaty unkempt hipsters avoiding a gruesome pandemic. The trailer seems to offer the meticulous pacing drenched with suspense. It also throws in some of the horrific-looking infected that may not but likely will become zombies. But what's got me hooked about Carriers is the aspect of society crumbling. Or it could completely ditch this angle and remind you right out of the gate that PG-13 rated horror movies are more sorry than your dad after he blew your financial aid at OTB.

9

"I say we use this green-colored light to shamelessly market me."

9 is the kind of movie that's going to look awesome on my HD TV this time next year. With the ecomony in the crapper as it is, I don't know if I can bring myself to drop 10 duckets on a movie about a mad scientist's group of beat off socks who come (get it?) to life in barren wasteland after the machines wiped mankind off the face of the earth. If Toy Story went off its meds, completely neglected its pet turtle and let the voices in its head take over you're well on the road to 9.

9 is a cartoon produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov so you know you're headed into some reasonably twisted territory but the trailer is definitely not without its ambiguity. For example, the movie looks grim as hell, but those little nut puppets look cute as all hell. Then there's that part toward the end of the trailer when whoever put it together decided to say fuck it and cram a bunch of images together after he or she realized there's no way to to make any sense out of this madness in less than 2 minutes. The power chords blaring during that part hint towards 9 being more adult-geared fare. Better bring your 5 year-old niece with you just in case. 9 also features the voices of Elijah Wood, John C. Reilly, Martin Landau and Crispin Glover. The good news is you won't have to look at any of those people for a couple hours. Jennifer Connelly also stars and the bad news is you don't get to look at her for a couple hours. Can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, kids...

Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself

"Hey y'all! Where my peeps at!?"

If by bad you mean sassy black generic comedy with a hackneyed sterotypical garganuan in drag that claims to take no mess while doling out yawn-inducing wisdom as life lessons are being taught through cheap laughs then yes, you can do bad all by yourself. And I think I speak for most of us when I say we'd like you to do it at home. Go do bad alone and by yourself.

Sorority Row

"That's hot..."

Did you see I Know What You Did Last Summer? You did? You're a dummy but you're making my job easier. By default you saw Sorority Row and you don't need me to explain the whole goddamned thing to you all over again. Swap out the two attractive couples from the former for a bunch of slam pig sorority sisters in the latter who set up a prank that goes hilariously awry after someone winds up dead and the nail's pretty much hit right on the head. Some mystery killer does in cast members sequentially and by using methods that are supposed to be more grisly than the one before.

Its the stuff that cookie cutter urban myths are made of and you're probably not going to get scared unless mom's picking you up in front of the mall 15 minutes before 9 on a weekend. Oh, and she's picking you up in the Chevy Windstar with the wood paneling and you are going to church tomorrow. Now go to your room...!

Love Happens

"Yeah... not the kind of head I had in mind."

There's this really odd thing that happens when I sit down behind my computer whenever I get home from work at an ungodly hour in the morning. My intention is usually just to tie up a few loose ends when my morbidly obese cat, without fail, drops a noxious and hateful deuce mere feet away from where I'm sitting. His ass end in the litter box while his front end droops out the front. Oh, and of course he's staring right at me while he does it.

And the way he looks at me always says something to me. Sometimes that look simply asks me how my day was. Sometimes it tells me that he was thinking of nothing but murder all day. And sometimes it tells me a story. His face once pitched me an idea for a movie where a successful self help guru who's great at dishing out advice to others but can't follow his own advice meets a zany and care-free flower shop owner who not only shows him how to live life again, but also how to love again. Oh, and of course they've only got a short amount of time together which complicates things. He suggested Aaron Eckhart as the self-help guy and Jennifer Aniston as the wackadoo.

So that's what movies are coming to. Ideas my fatty of a cat gets while taking nasty shits are making their way to the big screen. I showed my cat the trailer once he covered his leavings after I saw the trailer. The way he looked at me when the trailer was done suggested he would've done everything exactly the same except for the title. He said he would've gone with the title, for obvious reasons, Shit Happens. To which I replied, "I couldn't agree with you more, big guy. I couldn't agree more."

Jennifer's Body

The old "we ran out of gas" routine fails again.

Is anybody going to see Jennifer's Body for any reason other than to gawk at, drool over and eventually violently masturbate to Megan Fox? If I got an iron-clad guarantee from any given underpaid theater manager that I wouldn't have to listen to so much as a strained syllable of dialogue from this crapfest my ears might perk up. But since former (or maybe even current, who can say?) hooker and Juno scribe Diablo Cody wrote this... story of a demon-possessed cheerleader wreaking havoc and murdering the male students at her high school and knowing you're going to listen to a trainwreck that makes Cityspeak (Google it) sound like the Queen's English.

So aside from sounding completely unimaginative, it would seem that with Diablo Grody writing it's going to be filled with alleged pithiness, made-up words that will undoubtedly turn into overused catchphrases and when all's said and done, an unshakable feeling of emptiness and the knowledge that you've been cheated out of ten bucks or two hours of your life. Whichever is more important to you. I like to think I've accumulated some level of wisdom over the years and my instincts are telling me that walking out of the theater after seeing Jennifer's Body will give me the same feeling I've had after walking out of a Fort Erie strip club in my youth. I threw all that money at her and I still couldn't touch, I'll get blue balls and that walk of shame to the car will seem endless.

Surrogates

No comment whatsoever.

If you're looking for a Bruce Willis movie that acts as a metaphor for social networking sites and doesn't have him playing a burnt-out alcoholic cop, you're not only ambitious as shit but you're also a total pud. The gang behind the third Terminator movie brings us Surrogates, which takes place in a futuristic world where people have robotic versions of themselves they telepathically link up with and send out into the world instead of themselves so they can atrophy and get bed sores in an easy chair.

Things attempt to get interesting when somebody's robot kills someone else's robot. This is supposed to be odd because not having to really live your life and do it through a video game console is supposed to take the edge off and mellow everyone out. Then the person who was connected to the murdered robot died as his robot self died. This leads to the possibility that anybody (in this case everybody) who does this can die at home, thus defeating the purpose of doing the whole goddamned thing and opening the possibility of the extinction of the human race. I'd go on to explain how Willis has to disconnect from his robot with the bad (I'm talking Nicolas Cage bad) wig for the first time in years and he looks all jaundiced and shit like he did in 12 Monkeys but I don't really feel like it.

Whiteout

"My hotness will melt this entire continent..."

The people that put movie trailers together are apparently taking things in a new direction. They're possibly taking things down a less is more avenue by giving you no goddamned details about what the advertised movie is about. There's also the distinct possibility that putting these trailers together pains those who do it just as much if not more as it pains us who watch them.

While watching the trailer for Whiteout I saw nothing but the lovely Kate Beckinsale playing a US Marshall going to the brutal but beautifully CG-rendered landscape of Antarctica. She took a shower on the other side of some steamed up glass, some bodies start turning up, some shit explodes then a few seemingly natural disasters occur. And that's about it. Whiteout looks like a diet remake of The Thing with no aliens, some slightly better effects and a certainly better looking protagonist. Even if Kurt Russell had the sweetest beard ever. It also reminds me that winter is just a few months away, so thanks for that.

Fame

Shake That paskaa, voit skanky narttu!

Elokuvamaine on yleinen homoseksuaalisuuteen. Eikö tämä elokuva ollut tarpeeksi huonoa ensimmäistä kertaa ympäriinsä? Viisi tyhmää starstruckia lapset on liian laiska kokeilla amerikkalaiselle Idolille, niin ne menevät tärkeilevä ja avoimesti faggy suorittaminen taidekorkeakoulua. Tämä tekee penikseni surullinen ja weepy. Deathklok hallitsee fuckia sinusta häviäjät! Jos olet koskaan surullinen, ja yksinäisesti yöllä voit aina tehdä yltäkylläisyys voileipien koirasi peräaukolle. Muodit 1990EISTA palaavat. Ja suuremmissa luvuissa! Joka Sypressin Kukkula albumi heidän ensimmäiset kaksi lukuun ottamatta ovat vahingollinen, jos nielty.

Aikainen mies käveli pois, kun nykyaikainen mies otti valvonnan. Heidän mielensä eivät olleet kaikesta huolimatta, valloittaa olivat hänen iso tavoitteensa, Niin hän rakensi hänen suuren valtakuntansa ja teurasti hänen oman lajinsa, Sitten hän kuoli sekoitetun miehen, joka on tapettu hänen omalla mielellään. Mene!

Sinulla on en ajatusta, mikä helvetti joka minä puhun, eipö? Maine on tasaisen huonaamman elokuvan uusi filmatisointi, joka tuli ulos lähes kolmekymmentä vuotta sitten, joka myös kutsuttiin Maine. Ja jos tämä ei vakuuta sinua mätien laatujensa, televisioesitys perustettiin alkuperäiseltä pohjattomalta esityksestä. Premissi on toiveikkaista ja ilmeisesti lahjakkaista teineistä, missäään ilmeisesti lahjakkaat teinit kannustavat toinen toinenä pitämään jalkansa maassa ja pitää tähdille saavuttamista. Jos päätät katsoa ennakkoesitystä tai nähdä elokuvan mitä siihen tulee, teet ei. Ja lähetän kissani raiskata sinut. Kasvoissa!