Today on my walk home from work, I encountered an old fellow on one of those four-wheeled scooter things. He was driving in elliptical loops in the middle of a fairly well-used intersection. He evinced no enjoyment in this activity; he simply drove and drove, staring grimly ahead of him. Cars maneuvered cautiously around him while he continued his peregrinations; he gave no evidence of stopping any time soon. I thought to myself, That is totally the guy who greenlighted License to Wed.

If I am correct--I am certain I am--then tomorrow I fully expect to see Joel Schumacher joylessly and ineptly masturbating on a park bench.

The point here (I have one?) isn't that Hollywood can churn out nearly anything at this point and fully expect to make its money back. After traditional box office receipts (no matter how humiliating), cable rights, DVD sales and rentals and overseas returns, Hollywood can clearly make any horrifying thing and make its money back. The point is: why do they feel the need to keep on proving it?

It's the middle of summer, so we're officially at the hammock point where the first wave of blockbusters has come, thrown up on your shoes, and left (Transformers; Born Free or Die Trying, Motherfucker). Now we get what Paul Harvey would call "the rest of the . . . oh my God, what the fuck is this? Are we still on the air?" I am purposefully excluding such clearly superior horror offerings such as I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and Hairspray on the grounds that their mere existence terrifies me beyond lucidity, and I refuse to acknowledge that whatever deviant fuckhorns conceived of them actually draw paychecks. A man can take only so much, and I am definitively not a man, and so I can take that much less.

Who's Your Caddy?

Clicking more or less at random on the cast list, I see that this movie has a person in it named Andy Milonakis. (Okay, I picked his entry because his IMDB photo makes him look like a sort of a failed Kabuki experiment.) Apparently, this guy had his own show on MTV! Whatever! I also offer here Mr. Milonakis' upcoming projects:

2 Dudes & a Dream (2007) (post-production) .... Ned
Wieners (2007) (completed) .... Drake Hanswald
Killer Pad (2007) (completed) .... Dinko's Geek

This is all I need to know to keep me from seeing Who's Your Caddy? That and the completely obvious fact that it's going to be galactically horrible.

Skinwalkers

Hey! Isn't this all of us? I mean, you know, those of us fortunate enough to be able to walk. And who have skin. Maybe it's an apocalypse movie about Us vs. the Skinless and Legless! Maybe!

No, that I'd watch. This is just another fucking terrible werewolf movie. Although the IMDB page does contain this simply awesome line: "This movie does not compare to the werewolf classics in the past as far as story line, but it does a good job showing that not all werewolf's believe in the werewolf philosophy of biting people and taking names."

I plan on working the phrase "werewolf philosophy" into my next conversation, and frankly, I'm going to plan on that conversation being my next performance review at work. I smell a promotion! And human flesh!

Charlie Bartlett

I have decided to stop watching movies that are titled with the name of someone I've never heard of.

(Confession: We do have a used copy of Charlotte Gray in our DVD collection, which I bought for the wife at some point. I assume she watched it.)

Bratz: The Movie

A nation deliriously awaits this uplifting movie about hydrocephalic teenaged whores. I assume that Christina Ricci plays one of them.

This Is England

This sort of ties in with my impatience for character name titles. Did Public Image Limited come up with this name? I mentally rechristened this thing as This Is Movie and pictured it being delivered to theaters in blue and white logo-ed film canisters.

Underdog

Jesus fucking Christ. I'm getting in my car right now to go run down that guy in the scooter. Just because.