Avatar: The Last Airbender

John's best quip: "We think he might be avatarded, though."

I want to make it clear: Avatar: The Last Airbender the cartoon is really really really really well done. Characters, both good and bad, are richly layered and interesting. Story plots are engaging, and the art is very well done. I had heard horror stories about this movie, and I am not sure why I was so eager to see a bastardized version of something I really enjoyed.

I could forgive the movie being bad, if there had been nothing to build from. But they had a very stable, solid framework that was completely bypassed, and this is the saddest aspect of them all. Comparable to neglecting blueprints for a well made house to use only relative measurements to build a sod house of shit.

The actors were also very poorly cast and directed. All the characters played against any endearing qualities we might have enjoyed, or even any joy.

Why Nickelodeon decided to present such a somber affair is beyond me.

At least it was pretty to look at.

Red Riding Hood

pooor almo draft house.

i am in the state of texas, and was taken to the almo draft house, a really neat theater that serves you food during the movie. really, really good food that covers the bad taste of this poor, poor movie.

movie makers i think sometimes have this problem where they have really major movies going on, and they make another movie on the side with their attentions divided unequally. visually, the movie can be pretty stunning. everything else.....

it goes from summer to winter in a day, the main character constantly pulls a knife on the wrong people, the acting was stiff.....

if you like bad movies, wait till it shows up on netflicks.

Management

John's best quip:

She's a saint.

Our Lady of the Burger King.

runner up:

Jennifer Anniston only boinks the mad.

watching this movie is watching the beginning of "quirky", but instead of very skillfully constructed quilt such as the royal tenenbaums, this movie more a very large blanket pieced together with hair, teeth, and magazine pictures with the eyes gouged out on a mental ward.

i think the film makers wanted to show at absolute love, a love that would go anywhere. instead, we are treated to a love that at best, seems like it was held back a year for eating wall "candy." maybe it would have worked, had the main actor (a definitive "hey its that guy") not taking manly acting cues from sling blade.

okie. so that's acceptable. boy meets girl at work, follows her to her homestate, then goes back home. movie should end with girl realizing boy is for her, and happily ever after.

oh no, this movie gives us meth teeth woody harrison who goes by the moniker jango. an ex punk who owns an upscale mansion in washington state while looking and maintaining friends who look like skinheads.

after various parachuting, romantic warbling of 'i feel like making love" outside a house, father son bonding, volleyball with monks, the movie finally ends in a predictable way.

maybe this is big in france?

Management

[1:20 PM] Beth: seriously
[1:20 PM] Beth: how the fuck can we explain this
[1:20 PM] Beth: you cant

... I am here to try to explain the film Management, but the truth is, Bee is correct. I can't find even a single thread of sanity within it. I will instead offer a few of the highlights:

When Mike (Zahn) and Sue (Anniston) meet at the beginning, she goes to stay at the motel he works at. He weasels his way in with a bottle of wine he claims is complimentary for all guests, then begins aggressively pestering her about where she works, lives, etc. On the second night, he tries it again with champagne and she asks him, flat out, if this ever works. He says, "... Not really." She asks him what would constitute it 'working': if he wants to have sex, touch her butt, whatever.

Mike says that touching her butt would work, so she says he may, as long as he leaves right after. Sue then bends right over on the nightstand and presents her ass. He sticks his hand on it and they share a long, uncomfortable moment talking about her work. Then she kicks him out.

She goes to leave... then, inexplicably, stops, turns around, and has sex with him in the laundry room. Then she leaves again, wishy washy about whether she'll come back.

Mike begins your standard rom-com stalkerfest: he calls her drunkenly, then buys a one way plane ticket to her city and accosts her at work.

Except it turns really weird.

Their attempts to make Sue all saintly range from over the top to bizarre:

• She's fixated on recycling, actively complaining about her inability to recycle a wine bottle. (Stock)
• Takes pains to point out the energy efficient light bulbs in her home. (Stock, I think.)
  
• She hands out Burger King vouchers to the homeless. This is actually one of the movie's only funny moments: not even the homeless guys want the BK veggie burger. (WTF)
• Her mom 'sells insurance to the deaf.' (WTF)
  

Mike's antics also move from stock rom-com to... just what the heck:

• Writes her bad poetry. (Stock.)
• Shows up outside her window and plays terrible music. (Sadly stock.)
• Gets a wacky Asian sidekick to help him out. (Shame on you, movie. But sadly stock.)
  
• Puts up missing person posters for her when she moves, and he can no longer stalk her effectively. (Creepy weird.)
• Parachutes into her fiance's house. (WTF)
• Becomes a Buddhist monk when she finally rejects him. (WTF)
  

Also, the rival for Sue's affections, Jango (Woody Harrelson, obviously enjoying himself)

• Is an 'ex punk' who is now an organic yogurt magnate (WTF)
  
• When Mike parachutes into their pool, Jango fires a BB assault rifle at Mike. He refuses to stop when Sue gets in the way, even managing to wing her. It was a display of very Woody style madness. (WTF)
  
• Puts on a glove, quite carefully, before headbutting Mike later (ROFL)
  

So... yeah.

In closing, I don't know what to say about this movie, and that means it earns the coveted rating of WTF++.

G.I. JOE

best john quip: Would it have been so hard to give one of them a hero's death?

so inane plot goes:

soliders on mission get intercepted by a baroness who is an old love of the main cornfeed solider. the secert gi joes arrive and make them honorary joes for sucking. they chase after this brief case a bunch through paris, turns out the mad doctor who works for the cobras is the long thought to be dead brother of the baroness. he makes himself commander, and is immediately imprisoned.

sweet jesus on a crutch. listen movie industry, i know you dont care about making "art". i know that all you want to make is money, thats fine. but there has to be better ways to do this.

i have never cared so little for characters in a movie. i have had more feelings for houseplants than the people portrayed in this movie. i cant tell you one of their names, and i just watched two hours of movie with those people. i even hated the main redhead enough, i think at one point i advocated someone smashing her face into the ground. do you know what it takes for me to turn on a redhead? it takes a massive amount. and she was a good guy.

oh and it had a waynes brother in it. the really skinny annoying one. no movie has ever killed one of them in it, and i dont really understand why. they seem like such a good target.

this movie was just plan awful. not fun awful, awful in that you kept watching the timer wondering how the fuck they could drag it out 20 more minutes..

Drop Dead Diva (or How I Learned to Quit Mocking and Love This Bomb)

Drop Dead Diva isnt a movie par say, but there was something about it that spoke to me. skinny girl Deb dies in a car accident, and gets put into the potato lump that is Jane. this means it is time for :

• skinny people who only eat grapefruit and three nuts: seriously hollywood? this cliche isnt funny anymore, its sad and it makes you look out of touch with any semblance of realit----oh well yeah
• a world in which all fat people are smart and nice : jerry springer show
• the idea that valley girl speech is still in: it's not. it hasnt been for 15 years. let it go, hollywood. let it go.

so yes, the pilot is bad. it is so bad that when i watched it with john, all we could do was repeat dialog back to each other like eternally damned parrots.

but it was easy to listen to while i did homework and somehow i am now on episode number 8. i even teared up at a scene, which could mean it worked what they were trying to get across or im hormonal. mind you, it is not high art, but the directions the characters are taking are getting better and better. i like the actors, the girl who plays Jane/Deb does a damn fine job that works really well. i like how they made Deb's old very pretty friend stick around and be friends with the new hybrid Jane/Deb. i also like to look at Margert Cho and wonder what the fuck is happening to her face. is she bleaching it? also into today's episode, one of her eyes was lower than the other.

so come for silly, stay for Cho's transformation into a cubist painting via Clorox.

Double Feature

Our two most recent movies have been The Haunting in Conneticut and The Atomic Cafe.

The Haunting is a haunted house flick: a son has cancer and is receiving experimental treatments for it. The commute is apparently bad enough that the mother rents a house closer to the hospital so she doesn't 'drive off the road after falling asleep behind the wheel.'

The movie tries to be scary. To be fair, it includes some decent moments: there's a squicky bit where Cancer Boy sees visions of how the house used to be a funeral home where a necromancer used dead bodies to call up evil spirits, and he clips their eyelids off.

However, the family succumbs to the raging stupids on several counts:

• If Cancer Boy has hallucinations, it may mean the cancer's in his brain. They do not tell the doctors he's seeing things for ages.
  

• They *own* an actual house, in addition to renting the ghost house. Yet, when presented with definitive proof that their house is home to evil ghosts, they stay. They keep a pair of winsome children nobody seems to care about right in the house for the exorcism, despite having a perfectly viable alternative that they are already paying for.

Worst of all, however, the movie begins and ends by proclaiming, proudly:

BASED ON A TRUE STORY.

Yes, a movie featuring serious discussion of necromancy, breathless revelations about how Cancer People get Ghost Vision and how prisons use iron bars to keep the spirits of the killers within from roaming free is... supposed to be based on a true story.

It even ends with the mother insisting, "Consider yourself warned!"

Because you might rent a house that used to belong to a necromancer who cut the eyelids off of corpses and left the mummified bodies in the basement to plague you for lulz. It could totally happen. Probably already did, and you'd know it if you had cancer.

The Atomic Cafe is, on the other hand, one of my favorite movies of all time: it's a documentary about America's history with the atomic bomb, told entirely via archival footage. Basically, it's a great film made of a hundred terrible ones.

All I really have to say about it is that if you haven't seen it, do. It really *is* based on a true story, and the difference tells: it's absolutely terrifying. :)

The Atomic Cafe

John's best quip: Basically, we learned that if the pigs ever rise up against their human masters, the A-bomb will stop them.

okie so, we watched the atomic cafe because we wanted to laugh. but you know how there is gut busting happy laugh and horrified i have to chuckle because dear god don't run into the atomic bomb?

you don't? oh watch atomic cafe and you will.

an assortment of clips from war time movies surrounding the atomic bomb, this movie makes you wonder what will make people in our future scream in frustrated horror to ghosts on the monitor.

-bee

The Rite

I saw this in a theater, so I had to go this one alone.

for reasons unknown to me, both the ticket taker and the usher both told me it was a really good scary movie. since they were young, im going to assume this is based on a bad sense of taste that could have a chance later in life. i must be getting mellow in my old age, because afterward i didnt even have the gumpton to harp at them. it was pretty late getting out and i need sleep to return fruit at walmart because they charged me 3 cents more per pound than advertised.

this movie was at least three movies we've already seen before with the added bonus of making you bored during a horror movie. how sad is this in a movie that features the city of rome and a cat hoarding sir hopkins?

the main character is pretty smarmy. he blatantly says he is only going to ministry school because he wants to leave his po-dunk town and i guess wanted 100,000 dollars in student loans. seriously, thats how much it costs to be a preacher. john the baptist did it for free, ya'll. but i digress, from these statements you can tell he is a great planner. his transition from skeptic atheist to super priest is a subtle and elegant as walmart lighting, but follow it we must so we can get to anthony hopkins.

i would say poor anthony hopkins, except he is a grown man and knows what he was getting into. anyone who read that script would know its just a pale imatation of hannibal lecture. he did a nice job though. he back hands a little girl like a pro in a scene that was undeniably scary. of course, it is hard wired in all of us that when we see hopkins crazy face we back away slowly.

a weird complaint, but i was surprised by the lack of biting. not one person was bit in the entire movie. demons dont believe in using the chompers in close quarters anymore?

-bee

Gor

Best John Quip: "

Man, I hope when I die, I go to cliche S&M fantasy heaven."

Oh Gor!

If you don't already know, Gor is much like the Scientology except with getting scanned, ladies are sex slaves on a desert planet run by barbarian men. The only reason that this isn't a full blown religion is that the author didn't tote it as such, but believe you me the whole premise is as wacky as Scientology and could have easily become a dogma.

But I digress, let's get to the movie. So Tarl Cabot is living a miserable human life being a wimpy physics professor who spends all of class talking about Gor. Students openly mock him, but I suspect no one reports this abuse of education because it's a fairly decent chunk of college credit. No less than six mullets in the room either. He gushes on and on about his ring covered in used chewing gum to everyone, which gets him dumped before holiday by his girlfriend. She doesn't do much except exclaim," OH TARL," constantly until the cool hunky chemistry professor comes to take her away in his jeep.

Tarl heads up to the cabin dejected while it fucking hurricanes outside and makes the poor choice of taking off his glasses to drive, the first of his poor choices but certainly not the last. Like a kamikaze Lindsey Lohen, he barrels into a tree and is probably dying.

Tarl wakes up in a desert and after admiring his blow pop ring, watches from the outside as some very nicely three tiered equipped warriors attack villagers. The fight continues until one warrior woman steals a horse and begins to ride in Tarl's direction, which at this point Tarl decides the best course of action is to jump in front of her. What was he trying to do, one would ponder? Steal the horse? Save her? Tell her about Jesus? Tarl never explains this curious course of action. Ironically, this skilled warrior woman falls off her horse and they are both immediately captured. While Tarl starts on his domino effect of fucking up the lives of every person around him, the baddies are stealing a giant pale raspberry that I guess is important. Dried snot of the Elder Gods? I dunno, but it is important.

So after Tarl and the lady are being lead away, the son of the Baddie Leader comes up and is killed because he was in the same proximity as Tarl. Another warrior falls under the aurora of horrible that Tarl exudes while the good village people help un-capture them? The village people take away his pants and fit him with a custom leather diaper thong and decide he is worth keeping around.

Trained by a mulleted Jason Marsden, Tarl is berated constantly for good reason.

They then all leave for the desert to rescue Warrior Woman's father and the pale holy

raspberry.

In the desert they are attacked, because Tarl was on watch duty. Yes, the only thing the man

had to do was watch for danger and he failed at that. Losing supplies, they head into the nearest town.

They have to tie up the warrior woman so it would appear she was a slave.

Who is entrusted with her care?

Tarl. Of course, this means he tells the whole bar their plans and gets into a bar brawl with the

meanest Master around, who forces the warrior woman to fight his slave girl.

Our warrior lady wins, but this isn't the last we will see of that Master.

Mostly because five minutes from then, he attacks them in the desert.

The movie gets really fuzzy for me around then, I only remember somehow they escape and

get to the city ofMcBaddy.

McBaddy has got it all. Slave girls in Princess Leia costumes, Nubian princesses with

currency super glued on their nipples, and massive plates of boar meat. Somehow they get

captured AGAIN, and McBaddy decides that Tarl is the right person to fill for his dead son.

He offers him theattentions of 80's back up dancer who knows nothing under his intense questioning.

Tarl doesn't wastetime asking the lady where his friends are, but she only knows of sensual arts

so he just asks her the same question over and over again. McBaddy decides that Tarl was

easily won over by vapid slave women, he then hands Tarl a red hot poker to brand the

Warrior Woman, which Tarl uses the opportunity to brand the king. This causes a major ruckus,

and Tarl and Warrior Woman are able to free all the enslaved prisoners.

They even get the holy pale Raspberry and it looks like things are going to work out.

Things are going to be okay. HAHA, yeah right audience!

Since it is Tarl we are dealing with, of course they are captured. Expendable Slave Girl

is thrown into a massive fire pit while Tarl decides what to do. Using his impressive bow skills,

he shots an arrow into the neck of the McBaddy who then falls into the bbq of the gods.

Tarl and the others rejoice, and return to the home city.

This is where the movie gets weird. In less than five minutes left to the end of the movie,

the movie's sense of plot goes apeshit. While not a great movie, the movie went into

mostly reasonable patterns. The flow made sense.One would expect Tarl and

Warrior Woman stay in Gor, free to love and spread freedom.

This is not what happens. A weirdo priest approaches them and says he was sent to guard the

mystic pale raspberry,and while Warrior Woman is concerned, Tarl shrugs his shoulder

and could not give less of a shit.

Tarl then, after promising Warrior Woman a cabin and warm clothes, goes back to his shitty

professor job without her. He attempts to talk to his ex, while her new beau mocks him.

He then punches the bastard which leads into..

JACK PALANCE BEING UBER CREEPY.

Unfortunately, this is what one would expect from Gor. Jack has a way of saying

"supple slave girl" that wouldmake the hardiest of greasy porn dealers shudder.

He says in a manner that makes one thinkhe rubbed vaseline on his lips in preparation.

He then goes to say that he has master plans to be king, and only one man can ruin those plans.

Tarl.

Which does not surprise me in the least and sets up for another movie in this ridiculous S&M fantasy.

-bee

More Thug Love

Bee's best quip: "This song, I will play at my child's bar mitzvah."

For a little background: Bee and I have been watching bad movies together for a little while now. It all started when I found a copy of Heil Honey, I'm Home online, and she, in her madness, insisted we actually view it.

It was fun, so here we are, making this a regular event. :)

This week's pain started with Thug Love, the story of a simple woman named Destiny. A... very simple woman. She begins the movie with a repetitive, delusional monologue to her therapist about how she and her husband are working things out, but she's upset because she needs to "make an appointment to see him."

She repeats this same monologue a number of times, both to other characters and to her teddy bear. No change, nothing. It's like she was reading it off a teleprompter or something.

Not long after, we meet her husband and his lawyer at Subway, like Bee mentioned. He berates her for being late and wasting his time, then offers a long tirade about how she owes everything she has to him, even her job. The same speech is repeated verbatim every time we see him, too.

Then we find out that not only has he met her in a Subway, his lawyer doesn't even have the divorce papers to serve her. He'll "have them ready in a few days." To his credit, the lawyer looks a little embarrassed to be there. He's also the best part of the scene later. When Destiny is relating the tale of what happened to her friends, (including the cringeworthy token white girl), she complains about how her husband "embarrassed her in front of the white man."

Somewhere in here, around the twenty minute mark, we're treated to flashbacks to these same scenes, putting her husband's abusive dialogue into slo-mo, to make him sound extra demonic.

Destiny then meets Troy, a young man who claims he is a 'photographer,' and wants to 'take pictures of her beautiful smile.' She brushes him off because she's a "married woman," despite her Subway divorce.

Sometime later, she's interviewing a bunch of crazy characters: a stereotypically gay black man, a pair of awful rappers, a stoic guy who says nothing, a man with a Confederate flag tattoo on his back (heritage, not hate, like Bee said), and a man with either an invisible friend or split personality...

First, we find out that she's interviewing for the position of office manager at her high powered international advertising firm.

Even better, Troy arrives. He didn't have her name or number, and he admits he isn't qualified for the job, so the only way he could've known about it is if he were stalking her pretty effectively. She misses that part, but points out that he's not qualified to be an office manager, (not like a pair of bad rappers). He counters by claiming he wants to interview for *her* position. She agrees to give him his five minutes, and he offers her some weak thing about how he will "buy her surprise presents."

Somehow, this escalates to the 'clothes on' sex scenes Bee was complaining about, including them doing it right in an alley. She even goes with him to a drug fueled party and has sex in front of a lady we speculated might be a voodoo priestess.

Destiny still attempts to reconcile with her husband one more time, even though they're both happily seeing other people, and he insists on divorcing her before the eyes of Jared.

Despite that, she invites Troy to a high powered business meeting at her boss' house. The movie takes a turn for the weird, here: Troy goes from 'kind of smooth' to '12 years old,' rifling through the house for a liquor cabinet, complaining about the lack of mac'n'cheese at a party, and hating his sharp new suit. Destiny gets weirdly 'angry mom' on him, creating this... just disturbing cradle-robbing vibe.

Shortly thereafter, we find out that Troy has been using her as his "sugar momma," and has a real girlfriend, who approves of him screwing around with Destiny to make some money.

Destiny dumps him, and ends up at a church, where a woman who calls herself "Miss Sinclaire," (this is 'Jessica Sinclaire's Thug Love"), assures her that she will find a strong man and be happy again.

So she dumps her husband, is promoted despite bringing her 'thug lover' to a party and nearly ruining a big account, and... we, the audience, learn nothing except that a woman is nothing without her man or men or voodoo orgies.

Kudos, movie guys.

Jessica Sinclair's Thug Love

John's Best Quip: "License and registration... chickenfucker."

Jessica Sinclair has woven for us a story of a woman who makes bad life decisions but suffers no ill effects against the beautiful backdrop of homeless people sleeping in garbage filled parks. Miss Sinclair also shows us that the only interaction that white people and black people have are extremely painful at best.

Destiny's, our lady of the hour, life isn't going so well. Her husband keeps trying to break up with her in Subways, and she has to deal with strange Japanese people who don't understand how to leave. Her boss thinks she is incompetent, but would consider her for partner if she could just do one thing right.

She runs into Troy, a "photographer" who loves having sex through clothes (one is reminded of Kitty Pryde), and hates fancy dress parties that lack chicken and booze. A simple man, not ready to be a part of Destiny's high living world filled with cd embedded tar art. They go to a Mormon orgy, and Destiny is really sure this is it. Destiny still reaches towards Troy after he makes a scene during an important dinner party that could be considered a hate crime by stereotypes alone. Called into the boss's office the next day, she makes partner despite poor guest bringing judgement and her boss's very clear disgust for her. She relents on being angry at Troy and goes to give him the good news only to find out via his real "boo" that she is actually his "sugar mamma," a term she needed explained to her.

After soul searching in church with head of youth services who was there to pick up her sweater, she hands her husband the signed divorce papers in an Olive Garden.

I keep thinking possibly I left something out, and I am sure I did. Just when you think ," Could that white girl really not think that asking for chronic in a group of professional black sisters is a bad idea?" She then talks about how much she likes dark chocolate men. This movie enjoyed limboing casually below every low point like it was Barbados Slim. -bee