Hello hello! Sorry it's been longer than usual, but . . . well, fuck "but." I didn't have any motivation for a few days, so I didn't write anything. But now I'm motivated! Sort of! See, the wife and I have watched a bunch of bad movies over the past couple weeks, and I'm anxious to complain about them. If you see a movie title that for some reason you don't want spoiled, skip the section, because I'm going to complain about them in detail. Well, the ones I remember. And the ones I finished watching. Anyway.

As I've mentioned before there are Bad Movies--movies that everyone knows are rotten the very first time you see a trailer, or even hear about it . . . a sequel to XXX? With Ice Cube? A family comedy with former XXX Vin Diesel? These are obviously going to be real gobblers. And then there are the movies that really should be good, and you watch them, and they take a shit on your sneakers, pick your pockets, and run off with your money while you stare at ruined suede.

I Heart Huckabees falls in the latter camp. This "existential comedy," as it is sometimes called, is of course neither: the phrase itself is a pseudointellectual oxymoron, a little in-joke to the audience that signals that it's time to give an arch smile and remember that one time in college that you had to read Nausea and hey, it wasn't funny at all!

Neither is I Heart Huckabees. It is, in fact, far less funny than even Sartre, which is saying something. At least "No Exit" had a nihilistically funny punchline: Hell is other people. In Huckabees, hell is Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin. Other actors in the film like Jude Law and Naomi Watts seem to try to do the sensible thing during all the pallid, miserable clowning going on around them, ducking the metaphysical custard pies flying about, but that just leaves poor targets like Marky Mark, who has no defenses at all against the awful onslaught of the Hofflin, and just seems horribly picked on. At least, that's how it felt at about the 45 minute mark, when we turned off this horrible movie and shot some heroin into our gums.

Nobody should ever see this film.

If you're hungering for a more glossy comedic treatment of repugnant people, you might turn instead towards Sideways, another film by Alexander Payne, a director who is apparently endlessly fascinated with people who are, pretty inarguably, complete shitheads. Lots of my friends really liked Election, a film I found completely cruel and unfunny, so maybe I missed something. Then came About Schmidt, which the wife claims made her sterile. And so along comes Sideways, a cheerful road movie about a couple of never-been losers looking to drink and fuck away a pre-wedding excursion into wine country.

The forthcoming bursts of infidelity are handled with purest unconcern: the director doesn't seem to care, nor do the characters: it's a guy thing, right, to want to get some last-minute sex right before marriage, right? And plus, who cares? The bride is obviously a shallow bitch anyway. Who could possibly condemn this doomed fucker's last wish for some final illicit screwing?

Hmmm. Am I so old-fashioned as to suggest: Anyone?

Look, it's not even that I didn't enjoy the movie for what it offered at the time. It is occasionally amusing, and has some much remarked-upon good performances, etc. etc. It's just another damn movie with some pretty rotten things to say about its characters (and so, us), and it either hopes you don't notice them, or it disingenuously pretends they aren't there in the first place. I leave it to you to decide which is worse.

Getting away from movies that at least take a stab at relevance, we can now move on to the movies that have no pretension at all about being good in the first place. (At least I hope to hell not.)

The Grudge is another one of those Japanese-remake-movies-featuring-yet-again-dead-people-who-will-hassle-you, and also with the little creepy girls, and also with the hot blonde actress that all the teenage boys are praying will take off her shirt, and no, she will not.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is the not-taking-off-shirt gal this time around, and she spends her time mostly gibbering in fear and not taking off her shirt. The most interesting observation I have about this film is that nearly every anemic scarelet to be found somehow revolves around hair. So, if you are endlessly freaked out by . . . hair . . . uh, this one will fuck up your whole world. For the rest of us, this film is about as unnerving as cleaning the bristles of your hairbrush for two hours.

Ocean's Twelve is beneath mention, and has the sneaky rotten tang of Soderbergh cannily filching the studio's millions of dollars so he and his gang of Li'l Rascals could all take a nice European vacation. Oh, and send along Catherine Zeta-Jones! Brad thinks she has a hot ass!

Even further beneath mention--several hundred feet of geological strata beneath it, honestly--is the reprehensible, unwatchable Exorcist: A New Beginning. Or whatever it was called. Poor Stellan Skarsgaard, moping around . . . someplace while . . . uh . . . . horrible things happened.

Look, I'll level with you. The next day, the wife said, "I know I drank a lot of whiskey last night, but I have no idea if we finished that movie." I replied, "I don't either." We came to embrace the theory that our brains were simply driving us to drink in self-defense. "MUST PROTECT SKOT-SHELL! MAKE SKOT-SHELL DRINK TO SAVE BRAIN! NOT CARE THAT LIVER COMPLAINS! EXORCIST MOVIE KILLS US!"

This finally brings us to my last film: the sublime, superb, unassailably magnificent Saw.

Here, finally, was a truly wretched movie; so wretched, in fact, that it was completely enjoyable, and I would recommend it wholeheartedly to deranged afficianados of filmic rottenness like myself in a hot second.

Saw takes approximately no time at all establishing its provenance: it so desperately wants to be Se7en that I wouldn't be surprised if in the DVD extras it featured its director giving a smoking handjob to David Fincher. Like Se7en, (which I really like, to be honest) the film assumes that really inventive depravity is a valid substitute for artistic creativity, and therefore gives us yet another uncatchable psychopath with a knack for ridiculously elaborate murder games, such as crawling through a maze of razor wire, or deactivating a jawbone-ripping bomb-mask. (Really.) What really impresses me about these killers, though, is: Where the fuck do they find all that great warehouse space? And how do they pay the rent?

"So I hear you're interested in our dank condemned building."

"Yeah!"

"Are you a developer?"

"No. I plan on constructing elaborate murder theater involving kidnapped victims."

"I see. And how would you like to pay for the deposit?"

Saw is embarrassing, wonderfully so, on a lot of levels. But mostly, it's the performances, which range from Cary Elwes' jitter-tastic, moan-a-riffic, unconvince-o-matic soprano shrieks to Danny Glover's (oh, Danny) growly rowly "I'm so obsessed I could just sweat!" baritone. Poor Glover looks like the director simply bought him underwear three sizes too tight and then turned the poor bastard loose.

I'd like to say I'm not going to watch this shit any more, but who's kidding who? Of course I will. What else would I write about?

And besides. Sometimes it's fun.