It's almost summer (proper)! IT'S THE MOST EXCITING TIME OF YEAR FOR HORRIBLE MOVIE LOVERS!

*breathes into paper sack*

These are heady times, folks. We've already seen the release of a surprisingly good superhero movie (Iron Man) and a surprisingly dismal assault on precious childhood memories (Indy and the Great Big Pile of Feculence). What could Hollywood possibly have on tap now?

Could it be more comic book movies? YES, SIR. WE MAY HAVE ANOTHER. In fact, you're going to choke on them. You, the viewer, are going to have to decide: whose superhero penis are you going to suck? The Hulk's irradiated, engorged, treelike member? Or Christian Bale's slightly sociopathic yet smooth and well-proportioned phallus? I know I've made my choice. (I deliberately left out Hellboy's fiery crimson member on the grounds that . . . I don't know. I'm having weird dreams lately.)

The Love Guru

I always hated the Austin Powers movies. Mike Myers is less a comedian or an actor than he is simply a comedy bazooka aimed directly at the camera, ready to fire catchphrases, midget jokes and, most of all, Mike Myers' winking goddamn fucking face directly at your forebrain. Myers is never content to let his material stand up for itself--not surprising, since his reedy caricatures are, at best, soggy cardboard golems--and unrelentingly fills the bald spots of his comedies with anxious mugging, often directly to the camera. His is a comic form that somehow manages to sell despite its near-overwhelming stink of comedy's anathema: desperation.

The few early reviews of this thing are, I am pleased to report, sometimes verging on murderous, which is hardly surprising given the threadbare talents Myers chose to surround himself with: do you associate Jessica Alba with anything remotely resembling comedy? (Pause for comments about her acting chops.) I see that Jessica Simpson makes an appearance too, and while she certainly can be very funny, it is never due to any actual intent on her part. Vern Troyer is here too! Oh boy! He has no verifiable talent at all! I wonder what possible gags could result from his presence?

Ben Kingsley also shows up for his semiannual paycheck, but really, Sir Ben long ago proved he is utterly without shame. BloodRayne is potent evidence for this. Seriously, watch BloodRayne before you watch this reeking thing. Spare yourself Myers' flop-sweat grins to the camera, advertising his unique sort of "ain't-I-a-stinker?" appeals to the audience. Mike Myers isn't funny; he's a strange caveman buffoon who has somehow parlayed wretched dialect work and a supernatural talent for insinuating instantly-irritating catchphrases into our society. Think of it as a public health project: we'll all feel better if nobody sees it. Yeah, baby.

See?

The Wackness

I can't decide if this is the most terrible name for a film in a while or the best. I do know I really enjoy looking at the cast list. Hey, it's Ben Kingsley! Disappointingly, he does not play a character actually named "The Wackness," because, as I've already alluded to, he already did that in BloodRayne.

Joining Mr. Kingsley is the utterly pneumatic Famke Janssen, the terrifying marionette Mary-Kate Olsen, and Method Man, the only person on earth who advertises his acting technique right in his name!

I have nothing further to contribute about the merits of this film. You're all going to be watching Wall-E anyway.

Wanted

I assume the film was titled ironically, like I Heart Huckabees. Nobody hearted the Huckabees. Nobody wanted this.

Hancock

If anyone can think of a better Matt Bettinelli-Olpin summer vehicle than this, I'd like to hear it.

Oh, now I'm just being snotty. To be honest, the trailers for this movie did make me at least grin, and the premise--a gone-to-seed drunk superhero--is pretty ripe with comedic possibility, though it gives one pause to note that the director is Peter Berg, the person responsible for the entirely humor-free The Kingdom as well as the astoundingly repellent Very Bad Things. So . . . approach with caution.

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl

Awww, it's that Abigail Breslin girl that caught America's heart for a few minutes! Soon she'll be doing lines in a bathroom at Harrah's with Haley Joel Osment wondering what happened. In the meantime, I continue to love improbable cast lists:

Julia Ormond
Chris O'Donnell (?)
Jane Krakowski
Wallace Shawn (!)
Glenne Headly (. . . )
Joan Cusack
Stanley Tucci

It also has Max Thieriot, and can I just say that it's refreshing to see unremarkable Cubs infielders branching out into the arts? ANYway, that is a really awesomely white cast. It's like staring at a glacier.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army
The Dark Knight

I have only two things to say about these movies once I remove all these superhero penises from my mouth:

YEAH, BABY, YEAH!

Ain't I a stinker?

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

Well, I haven't actually seen any of those things. I did once see a monkey washing a cat, but that was the Daily Show, and another time I saw a guy light his hair on fire at a bar, but that was me. None of these things are important, however. Because this last weekend I saw In the Name of the King by noted auteur Uwe Boll. So it really is time to die.

I'm no stranger to the work of Mr. Boll, having previously seen cinematic uppercuts such as the grindingly dull House of the Dead and the operatically inchoate BloodRayne. (Twice a year I complain to my video store that they still haven't bought a copy of the really promising-looking Alone in the Dark.) I was expecting the goods. By which I mean the bads. By which I mean the good-bads.

In the Name of the King is neither good nor bad, and yet it is both at once. In the Name of the King is the Schrodinger's Cat of garbage movies; until watched, it remains in a state of quantum superposition, and then when it is watched, the waveform collapses right along with your body's hemodynamics, and as you die, you think, "My last moment on earth was spent watching this movie."

This is, after all, a movie that stars Jason Statham as a farmer named Farmer. Farmer's wife is Claire Forlani, and his best friend is Ron Perlman, both of whom look distinctly embarrassed by the events unfolding around them. Statham, however, is incapable of looking embarrassed; Statham is in fact incapable of looking anything other than vaguely pissed off in any role he's ever had. In every role to date, Statham resembles nothing so much as Surly from Duff Gardens.

The rest of the performances range from simply slumming to baying-at-the-moon psychosis. In the former category I'd put John Rhys-Davies, who was apparently on loan--much like several set pieces--from the LOTR movies and Burt Reynolds, who looks so uncomfortable in his role as the titular king that when his death scene arrives, he appears to plunge into that good night like a man easing himself into a warm jacuzzi. In the latter, you've got Ray Liotta, a man with a truly puzzling film career that has seemingly rested entirely upon his tight, thin-lipped grimace-grin; he's the evil magic-guy villain, and he's about as frightening as a bent Slinky. Topping him, however, is Matthew Lillard, whose performance as the drunken fop who aspires to the throne is approximately as nuanced as the Dresden firebombing; halfway through the movie I wondered if Jeffrey Koons had paid him five hundred bucks in order to claim Lillard's performance as his newest art installation.

Somwhere in the middle of this miserable pack were questionable entities such as Kristanna Loken as the leader of a group of fierce dryads who are impeccable vine aerialists, and the always dependably awful Leelee Sobieski, as usual deploying her blankest brand of marble-mouthed dialogue and weirdly stiff gait. Both of them lose points in the end; Loken for not taking off her tunic like she pointlessly did in BloodRayne and Sobieski for failing to get punched in the face by Nic Cage like she pointlessly did in The Wicker Man. Frankly, I expect more from these ladies.

Boll's approach to action sets here is typically and magisterially Bollean: in order for the actors to not have to learn anything more than rudimentary combat moves, he simply makes sure that each scene is edited to contain no more than two seconds of action at a time. That way, you can see Jason Statham wave his sword within three feet of a combatant, and in the next shot, a basketball covered with hair and ketchup is thrown into the air next to the boom mike, and then you get a cut of John Rhys-Davies eating some corn. In the meantime, there are ninja archers performing balletic moves before firing synchronized arrow shots directly towards the moon and Loken and her band of Cirque du Soleil vine-winders are all swooping up and down failing to fall out of their shirts. The overall effect is not unlike having a small child describe his fever dreams to you. "And then the demon snowmen showed up but Superman and Matt Damon beat them with their science fart machine."

Did I mention the cannon fodder that Our Heroes are constantly battling? They are called the Krugs, and they appear to be cripples with scoliosis outfitted in armor made of artichokes. Their main battle strategy seems to consist of hunching over, running in circles and waving their arms in the air, creating the interesting effect of appearing to be a maurading band of vegetable-based addled ravers.

I mustn't keep thinking about this movie. Watching this film is like self-administering the Ludovico technique.

I can't go on. I must go on. It seems it wasn't quite time to die, but I also don't see Godot anywhere on the horizon. So: nothing to do but keep talking to you.

Let me tell you about my mother.

Earlier tonight, staring at the gaping void that is the Wednesday 8:00 PM time slot, I made a choice. I watched The Price is Right. There he was! Drew Carey! Asking people penetrating questions such as: "So, how much do you think this can of beans is?" I love America.

(Please don't eat canned beans.)

The producers of The Price is Right were smart in that they have preserved nearly every embarrassing, half-assed aspect of the show, from the "Come on down!" hucksterism and hysteria to the bemused contempt of the host: Drew Carey treated most of the adrenalized contestants much like a cruise hypnotist treats the mooks he yanks from the crowd that he's about to force to act like homosexual construction workers. Carey seemed momentarily vitalized by the sudden appearance of a contestant wearing a Bernie Kosar jersey--he very nearly came within shouting distance of actual charm--before settling torpidly back into his colossal suit, like a hermit crab wearily withdrawing into a discarded Ding-Dong wrapper.

When I was a younger fellow, I had an unearthly love for game shows. I do not know why, apart from humanity's seemingly bottomless appreciation for these polyester spectacles. Wikipedia gives 197 pages of virtual ink to American game shows alone (out of 248 possible); I didn't have the heart or the intestines to even see what including the Brits would tot up to.

There was nothing I loved more as a kid than, when staying home sick (or in the summers) waking up to gargle joyously with a potent cocktail of daytime game shows.

(Apart, of course, from Saturday morning cartoons, but even then, I'm not sure. For one thing, I have way too many memories of the fucking Macy's Day Parade ruining everything. There I'd be sitting, at 7:00 AM, nearly in tears, as I saw a giant Pluto float fill my tiny TV screen. FUCK YOU, Macy's Day Parade. That was always the worst day of the year for me. "Look, it's a big Snoopy float!" my mom once said, trying to cheer me up. "You like Snoopy." "Not today!" I shrieked. She gave up and told me that the Smurfs would be back next Saturday. I was unmoved. I hated the Smurfs. Then a Smurf float went by on TV at the fucking parade, and I retreated into autism until I was old enough to smoke and legitimately practice sneering.)

But game shows! And not to get all 'mudgy on you all, but back in the day? THEY WERE GAME SHOWS. Sort of. At least they weren't botulism vectors like Deal or No Deal, which dares to ask the question "Can you count to 26?" Here were some of my favorites.

The Joker's Wild

Joker! JOKER! JOKER!

This one is probably the earliest I remember, almost certainly because of the completely Mephistophelean appearance and demeanor of the host, Jack Barry. It welded all the tedium and dumb luck of slot machines with all the tedium and dumb luck of general trivia questions, and even better, when contestants missed a question, Jack Barry would explode into a cloud of stinging insects and eat his eyes right on camera. Winners were simply allowed to sob emptily as God turned his face away from them; it was a real sinner's game show.

Sale of the Century

I don't remember a lot about this one except again for the host, the diabolical asshole Jim Perry, who would periodically haggle with the contestants over the opportunity to "buy" prizes like robots that juggled dog turds. A surreally unctious douchebag, Jim Perry set the bar high for all future game show hosts to come. The show itself is also a sobering historical document: at the beginning of the show, each contestant had twenty bucks to spend. Awesome. Twenty bucks. That's like getting the opportunity to check your tire pressure at Conoco today.

(On edit . . . does Conoco even still exist? I think I hear my joints gabbling.)

The $(X) Pyramid

Oh, you all remember this; it long ago passed into the Emersonian Oversoul. A relative of the hoary Password game, this one paired B-list celebrities with fools from the crowd you attempted to get your partner to say a word or short phrase without using that word or any variants. I can't tell you how many hours I spent shouting out helpful clues for Michael J. Fox as he attempted to induce his partner to say things like "furburger" or "Morey Amsterdam."

Famously, the big prize money came at the endgame, which was basically the same thing only more restrictive. When (rarely) the contestant actually won, viewers would thrill to the sight of the ageless, ossified Dick Clark rushing over to perch on the back of the winner's chair and ecstatically shit onto the contestant's hair.

Press Your Luck

Another American classic, and another American classic TV hero, host Peter Tomarken, a charmless, witless haircut whose notable character trait was his sadistic good cheer displayed whenever one of the contestants hit a "Whammy," thereby losing all of their accumulated monies and causing some truly primitive animated shenanigans to take place, which featured things like the unfortunate Whammy being assaulted with hooks or date-raped or some such, and all the while Tomarken would be chanting things like "Guess you fucked it!" or "Pulled off your dick-skin there, didn't you!?" This show was really marketed mostly towards self-harming epileptics.

Name That Tune

"I can name that tune in one note."

Nobody can name any tune in one note. FUCK YOU, NAME THAT TUNE.

This wasn't a show for a young kid; they always played fucking garbage like Marvin Hamlisch. The producers probably got a little sweaty when they felt like being nervy and dared to plunk out seven notes of "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Game shows are by definition hopelessly square, but Name That Tune was nearly a hypercube of curdled lameness.

The Hollywood Squares

I don't really have to summarize any of these, do I? They're almost all culture roadmarkers. Anyway, this wasn't even really a favorite of mine except for Paul Lynde, who for years I figured was a brilliantly inventive comic improvisor. "He is so funny!" I would screech at my parents, who would trade worried looks. "Wayland Flowers and Madam aren't nearly as funny," I'd solemnly proclaim. My parents traded a new set of looks, ones that said, "Well, at least he doesn't like bad queeny puppet acts."

I really didn't figure out for a long time that those fucking fools were being fed their zinger lines. And by then, Peter Marshall had left, so who cared? Also, I eventually had sex with women, which cheered up my parents. Sorry, gays! Seriously, you didn't want me lurking around anyway.

Tic Tac Dough

Another tic-tac-toe-inspired game (obviously), also salted with moronically easy trivia elements. Notable mostly for the immaculately lacquered host Wink Martindale (who, seemingly unchanged, now shills for Orbitz). I really only remember this show because my father once called him "Stink Fartindale," which I considered the finest example of comedy ever dreamed up by man.

Clearly, I still do.

Summer's coming! And so too are summer movies, all of which are based on comic books. You know you're going to see Iron Man, right? Even though it is clearly going to be terrible? And there's another Hulk movie for some reason! Apparently, we all did something wrong, and this is our punishment. All we can do is hang our hopes on possibly awesome things such as the next installments in the Hellboy and Batman series, and happily, they both look like they might be cinemagasmic.

And if they're not, it'll all be okay. Uwe Boll is hard at work on Bughead Jughead: Riverdale Insect Blood Massacre Tit Bomb.

(Just kidding. He's actually working on Alone in the Dark II. Seriously. It's got Lance Henriksen, Michael Pare and PJ Soles! Wow.)

Let's see what's coming to the theaters in the meantime. Late April means never having to say "I'm sorry I watched these terrible movies."

88 Minutes

It's nice of the producers to let us know ahead of time exactly how long we're going to have to tolerate Al Pacino's peculiarly canine take on diction and inflection. This movie also features Leelee Sobieski, who is rapidly emerging as my Favorite Actress That Indicates Total Disaster: she was last seen (if we stretch the literal definition of that word) in In The Name of the King (Uwe! Never die) and also the indelibly deranged remake of The Wicker Man, which might have been 2006's finest comedy. I never particularly admired nor even enjoyed the work of Nic Cage, but you can say this for him: he got to punch Leelee Sobieski in the face, which in these dire times in America, is really something to aspire to.

As usual, IMDB's plot keywords tell the whole story here: Exploding Car / Female Nudity / Seaplane

Fuck it, I'll rent that.

Pathology

I love horror movies! Hey, and it has Milo Ventimiglia, who was nice and inoffensive in Heroes, even if that second season was ridiculously bad! This might be fun! I wonder why they're dumping this off in the shoulder season?

Alyssa Milano

Oh. Never mind.

Well. Okay, so it's not going to be any good. But, I mean, it's not like these guys are stupid, right? It's not like they'd make any other bizarre, campy casting choices that would torpedo this film, you know?

John de Lancie

Oh.

The producers are smart in a diabolical way. They know the movie will make ten dollars in the theaters. But when it hits DVD, it will make millions from the GenCon crowd, who will breathlessly wait for the scene when Samantha Micelli gives Q the old juicy squat.

Deception

Buzz is all around this film mainly due to rumors that Ewan MacGregor failed to wave his enormous penis around due to complaints from the notoriously nubby co-star Hugh Jackman.

HA HA! I made a dick joke.

No, seriously, I'm kind of excited about any movie that features the phrase "sex club" in its synopsis and also has Maggie Q listed in the cast. Unless it turns out that she has a giant Scottish penis, which would be just my fucking luck.

Plot Keywords: Nun / Mother Superior / Nun's Habit

HOT.

Speed Racer

Remember when Bound came out and everyone sort of gasped at these audacious fellows who dared to weld pretentious, showy cinematography with incredibly hot women fucking each other? Remember when The Matrix came out and redefined sci-fi forever by introducing turgidity and incoherence to a genre that had previously never known such concepts?

They are breaking new ground AGAIN. This existential take on the inexplicably beloved cartoon features Speed pointlessly driving in circles forever while dodging guided missiles, evil ninja motorcyclists and Chim-Chim's occasional semen blasts. It's like life.

Except this time, Spritle suffocates in the trunk. SPOILER ALERT!

You know what we haven't done for a while? Prejudged movies! It is, of course, one of my very favorite times of the prejudging year: just before summer, a legendary dumping ground for unloved and underfunded projects that only got greenlighted because some frowsy flack gobbled some flap-handed, excitable producer a few years ago.

The usual note for those unfamiliar with the format: These are movies that are coming out soon that I have no intention of seeing, but unfortunately probably will someday on cable. They are almost always movies that I have decided ahead of time are undoubtedly horrid based on IMDB, any ads or trailers available, or simply by their titles or cast members or, really, anything else. They may contain spoilers--often inadvertent--because I have also decided that due to their speculative and subjective wretchedness, such niggling details could not possibly make a difference in terms of these drain-circling films' possible enjoyability.

Never Back Down

For one thing, fuck that. If I have learned anything in this life, it is this: frequently back down. Disagreement at the office? Back down! Wife upset with you? Back down! It's really just easier.

Clearly Djimon Hounsou agrees with me, as this two-time Oscar nominee is now capitulating to his agent's agonized pleas for monthly paychecks. (I know this is unfair. He also recently did Blood Diamond, a movie that everyone pretended to see and which carried the ghost of respectability, but he's also been in laughable turkeys such as Eragon, Constantine, and, my favorite, the risible The Island.)

IMDB PLOT OUTLINE: At his new high school, a rebellious teen (Faris) is lured into an underground fight club, where he finds a mentor in a mixed martial arts veteran (Hounsou).

I think it's fair to say that we all know somebody from high school who had a similar experience. For me, my mentor was Hunkle, whose skin color was different from mine, and taught me valuable lessons about fasting and shitting into colanders to examine the contents of my frantically confused intestines, which he would then examine in order to divine my future.

"You will one day write reviews of horrible movies that you have never seen," he told me gnomishly one day, rattling around some marbles in my colander. We never spoke again.

Horton Hears A Who!

Skot hears the anguished screams of unlucky parents! I do love Hollywood's complete lack of concern for history in these sorts of things; Jim Carrey voices Horton here, and his last kiddie flick voice work was for the unilaterally reviled How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Leaving that stinking disaster aside (and which, yeah, probably made millions anyway), Mr. Carrey hasn't exactly been knocking them out of the park for the adults either: The Number 23 is aptly titled in that it is exactly 21 spots down the list of "things more unpleasant than number 2, i.e. human feces," and Fun With Dick and Jane was, after a court judgment, released on DVD under the alternate title We Make No Claims As To Your Filmic Experience With Dick and Jane.

Carrey has his work cut out for him, however: Jonah Hill is also doing voice work for this movie, and it's going to be a tough call as to who can be more fucking irritating even while not actually appearing onscreen. I think the kid has a shot, if he can be heard over Steve Carell, who, in addition for being known for being loud as hell, also manages, in the way of all the best voice actors, to always sound exactly like Steve Carell, which makes him a sensible choice for a vocal performance.

Sleepwalking

IMDB PLOT OUTLINE: The drama follows an 11-year-old girl's struggle to come to terms with her mother's abandonment.

RUN! RUN EVERYBODY!

Charlize Theron ... Joleen
Dennis Hopper ... Mr. Reedy
Woody Harrelson ... Randall

YOU HAVE TO RUN FASTER! IT'S RIGHT BEHIND YOU!

Sample dialogue: James: [to Tara] My whole life I feel like I've been sleepwalking. But you helped me. You woke me up.

You didn't run fast enough. Now you're dead. Nice work, stupid.

BONUS IMDB NONSENSE: "If you enjoyed this title, our database also recommends: Shaft."

Drillbit Taylor

In three years, every film produced in Hollywood will be written by Judd Apatow, one of Judd Apatow's friends, or someone who is holding a screwdriver to Judd Apatow's throat. I really can't wait for Elizabeth: The Fingerbanging, where Cate Blanchett succumbs to the fumbling digital advances of Seth Rogen, who then spends 94 agonizing minutes rummaging around in her immaculate bustle.

IMDB TAGLINE: You get what you pay for.

Ah! So they're only charging fifty cents to go see this. Well, that's nice.

Superhero Movie

I'm not sure what's left to say about this pestilential series of alleged satires. I guess I'll just mean-spiritedly rag on some of the principals and call it a fucking night.

Craig Mazin, writer and director: Appeared as a contestant on "Win Ben Stein's Money" (1997). He didn't win.

Craig Bierko, actor: Was originally cast as Chandler in "Friends" but turned down the role and was replaced by Matthew Perry.

Leslie Nielsen, Van Helsing to comedy: Is entirely horrible. Born in 1926, is unfortunately also apparently immortal.

Djimon Hounsou, actor: Not in this movie. Don't back down, Djimon.

Happy November! Miserable yet? No? You must have not seen Fred Claus yet! I mean, I haven't either, but its existence still makes me deeply unhappy. Here it is only the first bit of fucking November, and what do we get unleashed on us? A clearly awful holiday movie with Vince Vaughn. I regard Vince Vaughn as clear proof of one unassailable fact about Hollywood executives: they hate happiness. What else other than purest misanthropy could move them to cast Vince fucking Vaughn in a holiday comedy? The man hasn't ever bothered to act a day in his life. He just gets out there and Vaughns. Yes, Vince, give me more of those hilarious clicky-eyes and rapid-fire speech! You're like a Touretter, only less funny! Remember when we all thought he was "money" in Swingers? Can we get a fucking refund yet?

Oh, let's see how else Hollywood is planning on ruining things for us soon enough.

Beowulf

THIS! IS! SPARTA!
I! AM! BEOWULF!
WE'RE! OUT! OF STAMPS!

One of these phrases can be heard resounding throughout the Kurruk household during the holidays. Can you guess which one? Hollywood has taught me that overdramatic screaming is the only way to get my point across. Mike Mignola knew this. BABIES LIKE IRON! Mike Mignola is a genius.

You know who isn't a genius? Robert Zemeckis, of course, the genial hack who never met a gimmick he didn't like, such as de-legging Gary Sinise in Forrest Gump or pretending there was anything more to the story of Death Becomes Her other than gleefully doing hideous things to Goldie Hawn (inspired, I agree).

Beowulf ventures into the same Uncanny Valley that Polar Express explored, but still without creepy sex objects--except, of course, for Angelina Jolie, prompting a horrified audience to wonder, "Wasn't she already creepy?" Zemeckis is the guy over in the corner, hunched over and humping the motion capture machine Grendel's mother emerges naked from a steam bath on the video monitor.

Love in the Time of Cholera

HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Hey, where is everybody? Oh, right, cholera.

Oh, cheer up. It's got Javier Bardem! Everyone wants to fuck him, even me! It's also got . . . ah . . . Benjamin Bratt! He . . . he was in Catwoman! Huh? Huh? And--wait, don't go!--wait, we've also got . . . John Leguizamo!

I predict this will be the most successful holiday film ever released with "cholera" in the title, and I'll stand by that.

Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium

It didn't take me or any of my friends very long to draw parallels to Troy McClure's magnum opus The Contrabulous Fabtraption of Professor Horatio Hufnagel, except that Troy McClure is terribly funny, and this movie has Dustin Hoffman and the inexhaustibly ghoulish Natalie Portman, who is only capable of being funny when she is deadly serious.

Here is the only thing this film has going for it:

Jason Bateman ... Henry Weston, the Mutant

Enjoy!

I Am Legend

This is apparently the ninth or so adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel, which I admit I have never read, but I did see The Omega Man as a kid, staying up late when nobody was watching, and it scared the fucking shit out of me. To this day I can barely read Green Lantern comics, because those fucking Guardians of Oa look just like those goddamn little freaks.

Anyway. Let's take a look at Mr. Smith's filmography, shall we? (NOTE: Selectively edited for the sake of embarrassment.)

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)--Turkey.
Hitch (2005/I)--Horrifying.
I, Robot (2004)--Horrifying turkey.
Bad Boys II (2003)--Despicable.
Men in Black II (2002)--RUN! RUN!
The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000)--HAHAHAHAHAHAHA--hey, wait, where's Dorf?
Wild Wild West (1999)--This is the REM song of comedies.

So go ahead, people. Take your chances on I Am Legend. I'm not seeing it without a power ring.

Okay, so about a week ago the wife weirdly decided to leave the house for some cultcha--she removed herself in order to go see a production of Twelfth Night. Fuck that, I said. I stayed home so I could see CSI. Which as we all know is the Shakespeare of our time, except for "Prospero" insert "Gil Grissom," and for "dramatically drowns books of magic" insert "clinically observes blowflies." I did this because I am America's greatest hero.

So I saw that, and because I am almost pathologically sedentary, I also left the TV on when the program ended.

That's when everyone else in the world sensibly turned off their televisions. But I did not! I stuck around. You fucking cowards.

That's when Viva Laughlin started, and my eyes were opened. Glued open, practically, except for the parts that I simply couldn't watch out of shame and embarrassment.

Where to start? Oh, the title, I guess. Viva Laughlin? Are you kidding me? This show was apparently ripped off from some unloved BBC show, and this is the American title they come up with. What's next, CBS? Hubba Hubba, Walla Walla! Holy Fucking Shit, Davenport! My Ankles Hurt, Grangeville!

Hopeless.

This . . . thing . . . which has already been nuked was purportedly a musical drama. This despite the fact that two of the principal actors demonstrated no singing skills whatsoever. More on this in a minute.

It also inexplicably had the very charming, very talented Hugh Jackman in it. Jackman's character's introduction was to sing the song "Sympathy for the Devil" as he strutted through his hot-ass casino. But here's the thing. They just played the Rolling Stones song behind him while he sang along. In other words, the show displayed an incredibly accomplished song-and-dance man basically singing along (nearly inaudibly) with the radio while grooving to some seriously uninspired dance moves. They hired Hugh Jackman to sing and dance, and then hamstrung not only his singing but also his dancing. It was the weirdest thing in the world. It was like hiring Rowdy Roddy Piper to sit quietly in a chair and calmly read from the encyclopedia entry about "professional wrestling."

It got much, much worse. I mean, even when utterly crippled by production bear traps, a pro like Jackman still isn't going to look too stupid. Other people?

Well, it would be nice if they could sing. The main guy--it's also telling that Jackman wasn't "the main guy"--displayed no evidence of singing talent whatsoever. But since he was also singing along with Elvis, it was hard to tell. (But I'm pretty sure that the guy could not sing at all. I know whereof I speak, as I myself am a depressingly horrible singer.)

The whole show opened with him singing along with "Viva Las Vegas." Remember that this show is--was--called "Viva Laughlin." Anyway. The man could not sing. I think. And even if he could? WHO FUCKING CARES? This is one of the most worthless songs Elvis ever recorded; Elvis at his pandering worst. (Frankly, I hate Elvis. I'm like the Chuck D. of hating Elvis, only I'm white and stupid and I also can't rap.) "Viva Las Vegas" is simply "Copacabana," except that "The King" recorded it, and therefore it is good. Fuck that horrible song. Fuck this whole show! I thought. It's so awesome! I thought moments later. I'm not good for me, obviously.

It got worse.

Did you know Melanie Griffith was in this . . . object? Did you know that Melanie Griffith trying to sing is a lot like listening to macaques being burned to death? Did you know that Melanie Griffith attempting to be sexy any more is a lot like watching a Sci-Fi channel movie called "Attack of the Deteriorating RealDoll"?

Melanie Griffith "sang" "One Way or Another"--again, with the full original song playing behind her, thank God--while doing some hideous seductive routine at the main guy, who mostly hung onto his tie for dear life and tried not to look too mortified.

"ONE WAY! OR ANOTHER! I'M GONNA GETCHA!" squealed Griffith in her patented moron-slash-babydoll voice, looking about as sexy as Will Ferrell dry-humping a rancid ham. (I assume that that is the premise of his next movie.) The only thing I can think of more horrifying than that scene, frankly, was her whore turn in Body Double where she insisted to her client that he must not come on her face.

I'm really going to miss this show.

Oh Nic
Nic
On Friday we watched
Next

It was so terrible
So was your wig
We wanted to call
Animal control
To report a dead
Something
Perched on your skull

You won an Oscar once.
Leaving Las Vegas.
That was a terrific movie

(Though I do have to carp
A little
That rape scene wasn't very funny)

What happened?
What tipped you over?

Why are you doing these things
To us?
Ghost Rider?

The Wicker Man?

(You wore a bear suit
And punched a woman
And later you complained
Of bees in your eyes . . .

Okay, that was pretty funny.

I secretly whisper to you,
Nic
Lost Nic
I actually adore that movie.)

ANYWAY . . .

I cannot let you go
You were H.I. McDunnough--
What happened?

You were in
Fast Times--
What happened?

You were in
Red Rock West
What happened?

(While we're on the topic
Can you also find out what happened
To John Dahl? Thanks, Nic.)

You don't have to do these
Tawdry things.
(I whisper:
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
And we all tremble.)

You don't have to. You can stop.
Look at us. We stopped.
We stopped watching your movies
Because they are horrible.

They stain us
Like your hair was stained
Because you made
Next

Listen to your hair

It was terrifying in Adaptation
It said: People really like this movie
Even though it is a pile of shit

Listen to your hair

What will your hair look like
I wonder

When you film that thing
With 50 Cent

Will you be bald?
Will it be threadbare?
Will it grow up your legs to coil malevolently on your head?

(Nobody will see these movies.
Your head will be a failed latchhook project.)

We shall not see you.

You are lost . . .

. . . nic . . .

Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of Brylcreem.

Well, I've done my course of antibiotics--Z-pack--so thanks, Ryan Zimmerman! For nothing. My symptoms persist. Awesome. However, in order to feel better, I can always look to Hollywood's post-summer offerings for some serious entertainment. Let's see what's in the movie dumpster for this fall!

The Brave One

I have mentally rechristened this movie The Dull Movie. Ah, revenge movies. It's an actor's playground: you get to really shine by registering the gamut of emotions from crushing grief to white-hot rage! From self-absorption to self-pity! From gun-buying to gun-using! Actors always get compared to whores because our whole job is to fake emotions we're not really experiencing, but we are terrible whores in that we love to pick the least interesting emotions to fake.

NEW FEATURE OF I PREJUDGE MOVIES! Minor actor you've never heard of who is in this film, and his or her previous project!

Victor Colicchio, who plays "Cutler" in this movie, previously worked on Mattie Fresno and the Holoflux Universe (2007) as "Janitor/Devil."

Mr. Woodcock

The promotional materials for this film show Billy Bob Thornton holding two basketballs in front of his groin. I assume this has some comedic symbolic value, but it evades me. Perhaps this is a documentary about hypergonadism.

No, that would be funny.

(Jesus Christ, Susan Sarandon is in this? I hate the world.)

I'm not sure what happened to the Hollywood mainstream comedy. It appears to be a dead art form, sort of like lithographs or Broadway. (It occurs to me that I have no idea what a lithograph is. Happily, I don't really care.)

Mr. Woodcock also showcases the talents of one Suzanne Friedline, apparently as the "voice" of Meredith Viera, puzzlingly enough. She was previously seen in such films as A Day Without A Mexican and the immortal short Crickets & Potatoes.

The Hunting Party

RICHARD GERE! TERRENCE HOWARD! JAMES BROLIN! Hey, where's everyone going?

You might also remember cast member Lejla Hadzimuratovic from her indelible turn in The Scary Side of Randall Coombe (2001).

Good Luck Chuck

Good luck, movie. In the plus column, it does feature Annie Wood--boy, "wood" she!, haw haw haw!--who you might remember from Cellblock Sisters: Banished Behind Bars! (1995)

You know what? I'm going to stop. I'm clearly losing interest. My next weak joke was going to be about 3:10 to Yuma, which I was going to abbreviate to 3:10 to Yum and make a crappy blowjob joke, and nobody needs that. Plus, that film has already been released over the agonized, non-blowjob-related screams of Russell Crowe.

(3:10 To Yuma does feature the talents of Lennie Loftin, who managed to find himself in not only the completely despicable Daredevil, but also the astonishingly horrible Time Machine. Kudos!)

And good night.

Hello hello party people those of you avoiding work people who are kind of wondering what Michelle Pfeiffer looks like naked these days everybody!

Sorry about the recent drought. Here's what happened: I meant to post more last week, but then I didn't want to, so I didn't. I AM FUCKING AMAZING. Then on Monday, I also didn't feel like posting anything, so I once again didn't, which frankly confirms how awesome I am. Then last night, my wireless connection--which I steal from my neighbors--broke down in some unidentifiable way, which caused me to more or less toss the laptop around like it was a discount tin of anchovies--remember, I don't actually pay for wireless access, and therefore have no real right to get pissy about it when it goes sideways--anyway, I'm a complete asshole, I think must be the final point here.

And also anyway, here I am stealing from my neighbors again. Which makes me sort of on the plankton level of morality, until you consider--here in midsummer--what Hollywood is unloading on us. THAT'S RIGHT! It's once again time to prejudge some inconsolably awful movies.

Say, let's try a theme this time, and see if I can stick to it! I'm going with . . . testicles.

Daddy Day Camp

Jesus. Really? Cuba Gooding Jr. long ago joined that immortal group of Academy Award winners who are asterisked thusly: "No, seriously." Brian Doyle-Murray is also in this movie, but then Brian Doyle-Murray is contractually bound to be in every movie that nobody ever wants to see, forever. When they dig up John Travolta in 2025 to film Battlefield: Earth II, dead John will huskily rasp, "Tell me Brian Doyle-Murray is here."

Or you could just slam your testicles in a car door for two hours.

Stardust

Am I a creep for being kind of delighted that this movie features an actress named "Bimbo Hart"?

"Hey, who was that chick you fucked last night?"

"Bimbo Hart."

(Pause.)

"You are the greatest man who has ever lived."

Anyway, Michelle Pfeiffer looks kind of hot. And if Bimbo Hart turns out to be a nine year old girl, I'm going to feel really awful. Particularly in my testicles.

The Hottest State

Ethan Hawke wrote this novel that absolutely nobody at all read and now he's directing the film. Can anyone explain to me why we put up with Ethan Hawke? Here's IMDB's plot synopsis:

A young actor from Texas tries to make it in New York while struggling in his relationship with a beautiful singer/songwriter.

I defy anybody to tell me that they really want to see this film. I defy them with my TESTICLES. Nobody will watch this nightmare.

Invasion

It's directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel.h Line up, folks!

Happily, it stars Daniel Craig, who in the last Bond movie got some serious testicular damage courtesy of a giant rope. Even more happily, it stars the Aussie favorite Nicole Kidman in all of her exsanguinated glory. Kidman is one of our more wonderful actresses, mainly because with every film she does, she pares down the number of emotions that she is willing to portray. Back when Dead Calm came out, she was all, "Shirt? I don't need this shirt." Then when the indefensible horror that was "Moulin Rouge" came out, she was all, "I might be persuaded to cough on my bodice." And now we have this thing--a third iteration of what was--let's be honest--a pretty stupid allegory, where she's all, "I'm out of blood! I have lipstick and hair dye!"

She should have stayed married to Tom Cruise. Now that guy knows how to manage his testicles.

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.

This weekend, as usual, the wife and I went movie-hunting at our local video store. It's a barren time for this sort of sport: none of the summer blockbusters are out yet, so all you get are the off-season offloads: Breach, for instance, the fairly turgid based-on-real-life story about espionage that features a thickening Ryan Phillippe, another wasted role for Laura Linney, and Chris Cooper mostly just looking like someone is pinching him for two hours. Lame. Lamer still, all the copies of Ghost Rider were rented. I cannot wait to see that film, mainly because of Nic Cage's previous effort The Wicker Man, which set all kinds of new standards for pure embarrassment, ineptitude and people punching other people who are wearing bear suits.

But there was nothing. I couldn't even work up the enthusiasm for any of the transparently crappy b-horror offerings, many of which seemed to feature either alligators, unconvincing zombies, or unconvincing alligator zombies. Then something caught my eye.

It was an older movie that I remembered a friend of mine had offhandedly recommended! Sure, it was from the eighties . . . kinda old, probably cheesy . . . but my friend had thought it was good! He said so! The movie was called Solarbabies. I picked it up.

(A side note: My friend did not recommend this movie at all. My memory just stinks. He had offhandedly mentioned an entirely different movie called Night of the Comet, and in point of fact, he didn't really recommend it so much as just sort of mention it. I apparently just took one eighties movie and, in my poisoned brain, decided to substitute in a different one because I was desperate to find a movie. Also, I'm a fucking moron.)

Solarbabies, huh? Kind of a stupid title. But it's some sort of future sci-fi thing! I like that stuff. I looked closer. Jami Gertz, Jason Patric, Lukas Haas, James LeGros and . . . Charles Durning? Wow, that's pretty . . . odd. But it can't be all bad! For one thing, my friend said he liked it! (He never said any such thing, and he didn't say that about a totally different movie.) And besides! If it were crappy, why would it be here, in my video store, in a brand-new DVD edition? Obviously it was a good movie!

We rented Solarbabies.

Solarbabies is about an orphanage in the future where Earth has post-apocalyptically burned off all its oceans, and so as a consequence, the orphans spend their time playing roller hockey. The Solarbabies play a bunch of meanies called the Scorpions, who CHEAT! And occasionally Adrian Pasdar shows up, displays no emotion, and communes with wild birds.

Then Lukas Haas finds in one of their roller caves--look, I didn't make this fucking thing, but I'm just saying that I suppose roller hockey makes sense in light of a nuclear-ravaged world that also happens to be paved with convenient roller paths every single place you go--a glowing ball named (it has a name!) Bodahi. Having made a new friend with glowing sentient ball, Haas does the logical thing and stuffs Bodahi into a storage trunk.

BUT! He can't keep that secret for long! Not from his roller hockey buddies in the orphanage, which is run by the "E-Protectorate" (the E is for Eeeeeeeeaaaawesome!), whose warden is Charles Durning, but who is ordered around by some terrible asshole in a truly amazing giant blue vinyl fascist zoot suit. He's mostly around to sneer. Adrian Pasdar wanders around some more, and some more birds land on him for some reason (it was clear I needed to step up my drinking early, so things get hazy).

Anyway, the gang discovers Haas' amazing lo-tech glow ball, and there's a truly humiliating Soundball moment (any actors out there?) where they spend joyous moments passing the ball around to each other while Maurice Jarre synths torture the audience. Hey, can you guess what happens when the single black orphan gets Bodahi? Yes . . . he sort of breakdances. It is the breakdance equivalent of Lou Diamond Phillips' speech in Young Guns where he delivers the standard-issue "the squaws were cut down in the night by the army marauders," which is to say, uncomfortably horrible and deeply embarrassing.

Then I think Adrian Pasdar wandered around for a little while more, resolutely not moving his face.

Okay, it wasn't all awful. By which I mean, it was. But we at least were laughing. The same way I guess we'd laugh if we realized that we were going to die in five minutes by being crushed under an avalanche of Swatches. You'd have to laugh, right? There was also, of course, the writing, which was delightfully wretched, featuring such gems as "Get out, you creature of filth!" and Durning's immortal "Stick with us, learn to serve the Order, and you'll achieve a decent life-grid." You have to sort of love terrible sci-fi movies where the writer attempts to create some sort of futuristic nonsense patois (dedicated aficionados of this sort of thing are directed to Sam Shepherd's unintentionally hilarious The Tooth of Crime as perhaps the ne plus ultra of the genre) that they cannot even bother to try and sustain for any reasonable amount of time. The Solarbabies would spend extended periods speaking in entirely conventional English before bizarrely lapsing into some brief comment about "putrid thinking." On my third beer, I was starting to indulge in some putrid thinking myself.

What was the movie that my friend had actually recommended, you ask? Night of the Comet, as I found out later after angrily (and incorrectly) accusing my pal of steering me into some horrible disaster. I don't know anything about that movie either. But I might just check it out anyway. It has to be better than Solarbabies. Right?

And even if it's not, I'll bet it's more fun than Breach. God knows that Solarbabies was.

IT'S THE MOOOOST WOOONDERFUL TIIIIME OF THE YEEEEAR! It's summer movie blockbuster time! Let the killing rain of dreck commence! I want to run naked in your murderous downpour! I want to prejudge you!

(Normally right here I'd make some nonsense claim about having no intention of seeing these movies. I'd be lying, so I'm not going to say that. Except for Evan Almighty, which nobody will see.)

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

The tagline for this movie is "Rise." Presumably they are referring to the penises of teenage boys whenever they find another dumb reason to show Jessica Alba wearing nothing.

Ha! See what I did there? I made an erection joke because of a hot chick who can't act. Not everyone can do that, mainly because it's pathetic! But I can! Practically every day! Hey, Anna Paquin! You're putrid! But sometimes you give me a boner!

See? I did it twice. Leave this kind of thing to the professionals, folks.

Anyway, this second FF movie carries a lot of promise because once again it features Ioan Gruffudd. This is awesome because: "Ioan Gruffudd." Also, I kind of hold out this desperate hope that they get so lost for ideas that they bring in the Black Racer.

DOA: Dead or Alive

What? Are we sure this is an actual movie? Shouldn't I have seen ads for anything that's supposedly being released in the next two months? It appears to be yet another video game movie, and it stars somebody named Jaime Pressly, whose name is familiar, but of whom I really know nothing except (thanks to IMDB) that she has enormous cans.

"Hey Jaime! You're probably putrid, but you . . . " Oh, forget it.

This movie is clearly going to be disastrously horrible, which means I cannot wait to see it on cable some fuzzy night while I clutch a bottle of off-brand rye. Here's some sample dialogue!

Bass: Tina! It's showtime!
Tina Armstrong: Dad! Not now I'm in my underwear.
Christie Allen: Which I hate. Why can't you just sleep in the nude like me you'll never know.
Bass: Oh my god.
Tina Armstrong: No dad, she's just another fighter we're just sleeping together.
Bass: Yeah I can see that.
Tina Armstrong: No. I mean we're not sleeping together we're just... sleeping.
Bass: Seems to me like my baby girl's found a special friend. We'll settle it tomorrow sweetie. Nice to meet you miss.
Christie Allen: Oh it's Christie.
Bass: Tina's real name's Christina!

Yay!

1408

When did John Cusack go from being to one of those rare actors who was liked by males and females alike (kind of a nerdier Johnny Depp) to . . . this? I submit that it was the terrible one-two combination of American Sweethearts, which audiences reacted to as if it was the offer of amateur surgery, and Identity, a movie that was a lot like amateur surgery.

I looked at the cast list hoping to see yet another embarrassing Stephen King cameo where he wanders around sucking on his teeth and acquitting himself terribly, but alas, he's nowhere to be found. Instead you get Tony Shalhoub, a fine fellow who apparently picks roles by blindfolding himself and throwing darts at piles of scripts, and Samuel L. Jackson, who--let's face it--has been coasting ever since he realized that after Pulp Fiction, he wasn't required to do anything at all resembling acting. He just has to show up as Big Sam, do his bit and cash his check. Sweet gig!

Evan Almighty

Seeing the ads for this day-glo nightmare, I was forced to wonder What the fuck, Steve Carell? Coming off of two pretty great comedies--The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Little Miss Sunshine--this is what you want? Jim Carrey's sloppy seconds? By the director of such . . . items as Patch Adams?

Then I figured it out. This is not a comedy. (It is, after all, directed by the noted drooling sadist Tom Shadyac.) This film is dead serious.

What it is, is a dedicated atheist's attempt to posit the inherent ridiculousness of the existence of God. This is a movie whose entire intent is--it must be--to portray a world in which God is such a terrible buffoon that His existence becomes, in light of the onscreen evidence, a world that cannot possibly exist. There is also the hard-to-ignore fact that God here (again) is played by Morgan Freeman, which would seem to point out any number of troubling issues, such as why God would be such a dick to people who actually were in his image as opposed to a bunch of white assholes who can't dance and perpetrate such crimes as Matchbox 20 and Tom Shadyac.

Another supporting point to this argument: I am frankly certain that Evan Almighty will share one overwhelmingly common trait with atheism: a complete and total absence of humor. Or anything resembling humor. Have you ever met a really fun atheist? A real cut-up, life-of-the-party atheist? Of course you haven't. They don't go to parties. They sit at home, chewing on their legs, dreaming up witty ripostes to esoteric Biblical quotes.

It's about time Hollywood finally embraced its Godlessness. I just wish they hadn't picked Steve Carell to deliver the message. He's too funny for a serious film like this.

God help us all.

Some of you might have heard the news that The Sopranos concluded this last Sunday if you were paying close attention to the news. I think the weirdest moment of that next day--the day the Internet went sideways--was coming home and turning on Baseball Tonight and seeing various ESPN analysts stammering to respond to hopeless fucking questions like "So what do you think happened after the blackout?"

"I . . . well, I think Tony . . . Tony's concerned for his family, and his family is right there, and Tony, he cares for them. This show is all about family, both kinds of, uh, family, and Tony is finally with his family and I think he's happy about that."

"Karl, I think that the real message is right there on the screen: Don't stop believing. Tony never did."

Or some such nonsense from people named "Buster" or "Orestes" or "Gorp." Yes, hope and happiness have always been running themes on The Sopranos.

Weird. Weird and horrible. Look, I'm not pretending I know myself--Chase clearly didn't feel like providing anything resembling a conventional ending at all, and he's obviously enough of a misanthrope not to give a shit about it anyway. I have my theories--just like old Buster and Gorp up there--but when ESPN babblers start horning in, it's time to open up the floor to everyone, I guess. So I took the trouble to poll some of the best and the brightest, present and past, to get their take on the most important TV event since Princess Di missed her exit.

So what did you think about the final episode of The Sopranos?

Elmo, psychopathic Muppet

"Hee hee hee! Elmo liked when the old man got his head run over like an rotten melon! Ha ha ha ha ha! Elmo liked that! Elmo saw the bystanders making sick! Hee hee hee! You know what Elmo also likes? Skin! Elmo wants to eat young skin!"

Izzle Pfaff: "I, ah, I see. Any thoughts about the startling ending?

"SKIN! SKIN! ELMO NEEDS SKIN! HA HA HA HA HA!"

Richie Sexson, .200-hitting Mariners 1B; loathed member of current fantasy baseball team

"What? Hey, stop touching my skin."

Camille Paglia, loudmouth, professional terrifying person

"My generation of Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become the authoritarian totems of the Fifties. As a feminist and a champion of the gay male, I find Tony's struggle to--"

Interview terminated.

Sylvia Plath, poet, Siouxsie Sioux progenitor, cruel posthumous punchline

"Tony, Tony, you bastard, I'm through."

Green Lantern, aka Hal Jordan, Guardian of the Universe, reciter of silly doggerel

"What the fuck was that? Even Rot Lop Fan thought that sucked. On the other hand, he really wants to hear more Journey."

IP: "What did Mogo think?"

"Mogo doesn't socialize."

Erwin Schrodinger, quantum physicist, pothead icon

"Until Mr. Chase agrees to another season, a superposition of states exist where Tony is both alive and not alive. Only when we receive new episodes will the wave function collapse and we may observe the result. I'm so high right now."

Note: This blog entry contains mild spoilers about The Sopranos. Don't read if that's going to bother you.

This coming Sunday evening, HBO will be airing the final episode ever of its landmark dramatic series The Sopranos. This event is momentous enough that the wife and I have made plans to travel to her brother's place to watch the thing with him and his wife. They are, of course, making lasagna. We've decided to take this all in together, for we are, obviously, utterly devoted to this brilliant, often maddening television show. We're all in agreement that nobody will fucking talk during the show, something we've experienced before when watching this show with nonwatchers who ask unwelcome questions. The phone will be turned off, just in case.

Back when I was obsessed with The X-Files, in the middle set of seasons when it was awesome and long before Robert Patrick and that other broad came along to ruin everything, I remember watching the show with the uninitiated or simple half-ass fans. They were intolerable. "So you gotta stab those weirdmouth guys in the back of the neck?" SHUT UP SHUT UP I'M WATCHING HERE SHUT UP

We won't have these problems come Sunday. We will watch the final episode as if sealed inside a large thermos. I believe the wife's brother has sworn to murder the dogs mid-show if they start making a ruckus from their imprisonment inside the garage.

The Sopranos is, as everyone knows, one of the most lauded shows in television history; some make the claim that it's the finest TV drama ever made. I don't know if I'm ready to go to bat on that one, but I'd sure rank it way the hell up there. (For one thing, there's that other HBO fan favorite, the unjustifiably maltreated Deadwood, which was a practically Jacobean take on the American western.)

There's been the writing, of course, which is routinely splendid, intelligent and knowing, whether it be something like Christopher unexpectedly spouting Bruce Springsteen lyrics to an annoyed Tony, or the utterly perfect description of Richie Aprile's eyes as "Manson lamps," or, most recently, the gorgeously crass joke of a storefront sign that read "Flatbush Bikini Waxing."

This is not to say that the writers have been perfect. The Sopranos is in fact famous for its litter of abandoned storylines, many of them dumped unceremoniously on the streets like little blind Gorey waifs. Famous ones include things like the otherwise ridiculously great Pine Barrens arc--apparently that indestructible Russian mobster is still lost in the woods, eating bark, unless he horrifyingly pops up in the final episode to stick a fork into Paulie's ear, which, if it happens, should surprise nobody. Or maybe they could revisit the Adriana/rap impresario storyline, which irritated Christopher so much that, later, he hilariously retaliated by crushing her dog to death by sitting on it. (I'm only sort of lying. He didn't vengefully crush her dog; he was just stoned out of his mind. But it really was hilarious.) More recently, there was the extremely bizarre amount of time detailing the doomed, gay Vito, which left many viewers wondering if they had accidentally tuned into a different show.

What is rather perfect about the show, though, is the acting. I don't know quite why, really--none of these people save two are what I'd call amazing outside of the context of the show (more on the outliers in a minute); it just seems that the show has caught these people at exactly the right time in exactly the right way. As a whole, they are amazing--but then you see something like Gandolfini in things like True Romance or Crimson Tide, and you're like, "What's the big deal?"

But Gandolfini is a big deal, at least for this show. He is terrifying, mostly when he's not doing anything, but simply thinking about doing something. He has never once on the show hit Carmela, for example . . . but I can describe for you in detail the times he has come close. And I'm pretty sure I'm never going to forget the number he pulled on Meadow when she mouthed off to him about being "the big mob boss."

But here's my half-assed theory regarding ensemble pieces: everything hangs on the secondary characters. Without those guys, everything else just withers. And, against all odds, The Sopranos delivers the goods practically every time. There's Silvio, Steven Van Zandt's utterly singular creation, Tony's consigliere, whose very posture seems to suggest that he spends most of his life wadded up in someone's pocket. There's Tony Sirico as Paulie Walnuts, who, disturbingly, might actually think he's a genuine gangster if some of his police reports suggests, but Paulie's unfailing need to make himself the center of any single event in the universe is readily identifiable--and is what makes him such a natural foil for Michael Imperioli's Christopher, who evidently feels just the opposite, and which is why he drugs himself up at every possibility. And then there's Robert Iler as A.J., Tony's son. Iler is either preternaturally gifted at playing an utterly loathsome, unsympathetic fuckup--in which case I applaud him--or he is a preternaturally depressing actual fuckup, in which case I would like to kill him. I will be charitable and assume it's the former.

There is also Jamie Lynn-Sigler, who is a very pretty girl.

Oh, there's millions of others--this is a show that's gone on for seven seasons, after all--but there are really just two left to talk about.

Edie Falco plays Tony's wife Carmela, and for me, she's the linchpin of the entire series. Not Tony. It's through her reactions to Tony that sets everything in motion, I think (I'm taking some liberties here). Leave aside the obvious blast that the costumers, makeup artists and hairstylists have with Ms. Falco. She's the heart of the family, and she's the heart of the show, even when she's selling out everything she believes in to buy a spec house. Falco is ridiculously terrific, and this show would have died in a ditch without her.

And finally, the lost and lamented Nancy Marchand, who played Tony's incredible black hole of a loving mother figure Livia. Marchand--a veteran screen actor, who, like Falco appeared reliably in crime dramas like Law & Order--managed to out-Macbeth's wife with Livia, a character so utterly corrosive that Tony--the mob boss--and his wife, Carmela--no shrinking violet herself--were apparently totally powerless to even step up to. True to the spirit of the series, though, Livia was--again, Marchand needs a lot of credit here--fucking hysterical. The wife and I are still fond of saying to one another in times of strife, "Oh, someone just open a window and push me out!" I will never in my life forget the scene in the hospital when Gandolfini is chasing her down the hall while she's strapped to a gurney, and she's smiling at him, and Gandolfini screams, "She's smiling! You see what she is? She's smiling!"

Christ. I could go on and on. I have gone on and on. I'm really going to miss this show. I'll miss the common language that I used to have with friends and family when it goes. I don't want to sound like a "Well, I know better than you because . . . " kind of dick, but I think it's telling that most of our friends--who are nearly all actors--all adore this show. I do think it's extraordinary as a TV drama, that very marginalized art form.

But as has been said so many times: If this isn't art, then what is?

And if you disagree with me, then I'm just going to shoot you. Which is fine. What won't be so great is when I start dreaming of fish.

It's time for the new crop of summer blockbusters . . . almost! In the meantime, Hollywood has some choice offerings that they're dropping like they're hot soaked in burning acid! I love my job. Let me again assure you that I have not seen any of these movies, and while I usually also append some lie about how I never will, I'm dropping that bit, especially since this weekend the wife and I watched Smokin' Aces, a movie so horrendous and mind-flaying that it has resulted in some sort of neurological trauma that has turned me into a sociopath who no longer cares about human life, much like every single character found in Smokin' Aces. Also like the creators of Smokin' Aces, I also do not care about coherent storytelling, competent editing, nuanced acting or unfiltered camera work.

In other words, I am perfectly equipped to watch all of these movies at some point. Pity me.

Even Money

Plot Outline: (All of these are lifted from IMDB) Gambling addiction bring the stories of three otherwise unconnected people together as it destroys each of their lives.

This caper comedy is made for all of us who have been waiting for Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito and Kelsey Grammer to get together and bring the yuks! How can you lose?

Oh. It's not a comedy of all. It's a crime drama. With Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito and . . . Kelsey Grammer. Gee. That sounds . . . good . . .

Hey, it's also got Ray Liotta and Jay Mohr! That sounds . . . good . . .

Is it getting dark in here?

What can be salvaged from this nightmare? Oh, let's go for the fun actor names. There's the appealingly salaciously named Amy Boatwright. One wants to approach her and say, "Hey, baby! I'll set your boat right!" Or there's also the equally wonderfully named Michelle Greathouse. "Hey, baby! Wanna give me a tour of your great house? I'm really interested in the downstairs." But then I'd probably run afoul of the truly awesomely named Texas Battle, who would forcefully remind me of the Alamo in several brutal ways.

I can think of worse ways to go, really. One of them includes watching this movie.

Mr. Brooks

Plot Outline: A psychological thriller about a man (Costner) who is sometimes controlled by his murder-and-mayhem-loving alter ego (Hurt).

Kevin Costner ... Mr. Earl Brooks
Demi Moore ... Detective Tracy Atwood
Dane Cook ... Mr. Smith
William Hurt ... Marshall
Marg Helgenberger... Emma Brooks

Dear filmmakers:

Were we bad? Did we do something? We are so sorry. We don't know what we did, really, but please, just tell us what it was. We won't do it again. Look, we bought these whips! We became flagellants when we saw the ads! We've lost so much blood . . . mommy . . .

Once

Plot Outline: A modern-day musical about a busker and an immigrant and their eventful week, as they write, rehearse and record songs that tell their love story.

[CLUNK]

Oh my goodness! Did I pass out for a moment there? Jeez, I did. It seems that just reading those shattering words gave me a transient ischemic attack. I'd best move on.

Gracie

Plot Outline: A teenager faces an uphill battle when she fights to give women the opportunity to play competitive soccer.

[CLUNK]

Ow! My brain! Oh, this isn't going well. I keep having tiny strokes! I fear that my dangerous mind may not be healed even by the cutting edge musical therapies that offer to bring it on through the talents of Mr. Holland and his opuses or even a drumline! RUUUUUUUUUUDY!

I'm entering a fugue state now, I fear. Must! Keep! Prejudging!

Rise: Blood Hunter

Plot Outline: Supernatural thriller in which a female reporter wakes up in a morgue to find herself a member of the undead. She vows revenge against the sect that put her there and hunts them down.

USA! USA! USA!

Er, well, it was shot in Belgium, but . . . USA! USA! USA!

Good lord, what happened to Lucy Liu? There was a time when she was on top of her game and all and then . . . what? My best guess is Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever happened, which is apparently the cinematic equivalent of Hodgkin's Disease. I myself watched it one night after the wife had sensibly retreated to bed, and I can confidently say that the movie made me wish for chemotherapy.

Which might explain why the formerly ascendant Liu is skulking around this disaster taking off her shirt on demand while grips dump buckets of stage blood on her. Michael Chiklis is also in this thing (ha! Get it?), presumably running around beefily and showing his lower teeth at anyone who happens to be around; so is Robert "Will act for Corn Flakes" Forster, who is a perfectly fine character actor; as is Marilyn "Brian Warner" Manson, who is a perfectly fine fake gimmick musician, just like previously fine fake gimmick musician/actors such as David Bowie and Alice Cooper. (Bring on the hate mail! I'm used to it. I've endangered more than a few friendships over my confusion as to why people kept falling for Bowie's incredibly cynical "No, really, this is the real me" line year after year after year, which was later completely ripped off by Madonna, also to great success. On the other hand, not even Bowie was stupid enough to do Monster Dog or Shanghai Surprise.)

Well, this is obviously going to be a mephitic horror. So why am I looking forward to this more than any other film?

I told you at the beginning. I have brain damage. And after watching these night-gaunts, so will you.

Hollywood never sleeps! It just occasionally dozes, and when it does, then all of its foul, misbehaving children immediately sneak out the window and into theaters where they then grope us and engage in all kinds of hideous cinematic frottage. For some reason, this always seems to happen right between Christmas and the summer blockbuster season. My only conclusion is that Hollywood executives cope with the post-holiday blues by drinking heavily, since no sober person could possibly decide that these movies are good or marketable or even tolerable.

Year of the Dog

This movie's riveting plot synopsis on IMDB is "A secretary's life changes in unexpected ways after her dog dies."

This movie's ad tagline is "Has the world left you a stray?"

LINE UP, EVERYBODY!

This movie, with Molly Shannon, Laura Dern, John C. Reilly and Peter Sarsgaard, appears to be Mystic Pizza, but with dead dogs instead of Annabeth Gish and Julia Roberts, and really, that might be an improvement. Unfortunately, I still wouldn't watch Mystic Pizza again even with the really audience-friendly inclusion of dead dogs, so . . . yeah, nobody will watch this.

The Reaping

Hey, not for nothing, but this movie is currently meriting a whopping 5% rating at RottenTomatoes.com. Oh boy!

I don't see why this should be, since the ads for this film strongly suggest that the hideous meat-golem Hilary Swank gets eaten by locusts, and fuck, I'd watch that. I'd buy that video. And I'd watch it on half-speed for hours on end, if it were sufficiently graphic.

Yet another alleged horror movie themed on the Biblical plagues, The Reaping appears to be just about as useless and unasked-for as the stunningly pointless remake of The Omen. You'll know exactly what's going to happen each and every moment, because you've seen this film a million times before. Remember Demi Moore's horrid The Seventh Sign? No? Then by all means, see this film. It's the same thing, except when you watch this one, instead of anxiously hoping for the lead actress to take off her shirt, you'll hope for the opposite. (Assuming you are a teenaged male, which I clearly still am.)

BONUS POINT: Also starring William Ragsdale, aka Charley Brewster from Fright Night! Boy, that was a terrible movie, but not as bad as this one will be. Welcome back, Mr. Ragsdale!

EXTRA BONUS POINT: Some IMDB member comments: "Instead of paying for this, go and buy or rent Signs." Wow. Since Signs is an astonishingly horrible pile of unwatchable shite, that's saying something.

Are We Done Yet?

Now this is the movie you want for pure, unadulterated horror. Answering the question that nobody ever asked--"Who wants a sequel to Are We There Yet?"--this movie is this year's Cheaper by the Dozen 2, a chilling disaster followup that resembles nothing so much as a dog returning to eat its own vomit. Rumor has it that there is a scene where the hilarious Ice Cube--noted for his comedic talents--falls down and/or makes faces. Also, John C. McGinley (CAN WE GIVE THIS GUY SOMETHING BETTER TO DO THAN "SCRUBS" AND THIS SHIT?) plaintively looks into the camera at one point and mouths "Please help me."

I can't wait for the third installment in this horrible series, entitled Am I Dead Yet?

The Hoax

From the cast list:

Richard Gere
Alfred Molina
Hope Davis
Marcia Gay Harden
Stanley Tucci
Julie Delpy
Eli Wallach

I thought for a while that this was a comedy project with the working title "Who Wants To Humiliate Richard Gere?" where the director surrounded the poor man with vastly superior actors and watched what happened. But then I noticed that the director is Lasse Halstrom, who has no identifiable sense of humor at all, and I was crushed.

Then I saw that Zeljko Ivanek is in it and I was cheered for a moment. That guy just doesn't look like a Zeljko to me! He's peachy.

BONUS POINTS: This will surely be the finest movie released this year that was filmed in Armonk, New York.

Slow Burn

This movie--which has been rotting in the can for about two years--carries the tagline albatross "The truth is just a trick of light."

My response: "God, fuck you."

Oh, what am I saying? Ray Liotta doesn't do bad movies. He's quality! I cite Smokin' Aces and Wild Hogs! Hey, what's up next for Ray?

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

Director: Uwe Boll

Cast List:

Jason Statham
Jonathan Rhys-Davies
Ray Liotta
Matthew Lillard
Leelee Sobieski
Burt Reynolds
Ron Perlman
Claire Forlani
Kristanna Loken

Oh my God. What does it say about me that I'd rather watch this film than Slow Burn?

Who wouldn't?

On Friday, I went to the THEATAH! To see my good wife in action; she opened her show The Duchess of Malfi this weekend, and, I must say, it was strangely interesting to see my wife murdered twice onstage: once when her neck was cruelly snapped, and another when her other character had her faced smushed into a poisoned bible. While watching these atrocities, I thought to myself, as I have so many times before, "Why is this art form dying?"

It's not a new thought. I've been thinking about the stiffening corpse that is theater for years. In fact, I confess, I tire of it. I'm probably more or less done with acting myself. And for the really large majority of you reading this, live theater is probably something right up there with bearbaiting or illicit donkey shows: if it's even available to you, you'd still probably never consider going.

If you do have any kind of local theater, it is likely either community theater of the "Let's put on a show!" variety, featuring calcified horrors like The Star-Spangled Girl. Or, if you live in a larger town, you might have "fringe theater," which is what I did for years, and consists of youth-skewed dynamos with the energy to put on things like Eric Bogosian pieces or strange adaptations of The Trojan Women with a sound design that incorporates Primus. But nobody is seeing those shows except for damaged perverts, because they're probably in the better, non-warehouse part of town watching the local regional theater put on a well-lit, technically sweet production (in an actual theater) of Pirates of Penzance.

Everyone else--which is still, I must stress, hardly anyone--simply waits for that NYC trip where they make the obligatory trip to Broadway, which is to actual theater (that is, everyone else, good or wretched) as Cirque du Soleil is to the hometown carnival where they serve poisoned hot dogs.

Those scrappy kids in the fringe theaters do occasionally score. My longest run was in a comedy called Poona the Fuckdog and Other Stories for Children, written by a very funny sociopath named Jeff Goode. It ran for close to half a year, and you don't do that if a show isn't genuinely funny: it certainly was, and featured such characters as a singing penis, God, and a Shrub (me). But it would be silly for me to say that people didn't show up merely for the title: It has "fuck"! Right in the title! Other shows have learned this trick. Shopping and Fucking comes to mind, as does Urinetown.

The Duchess of Malfi doesn't have this sort of thing going for it. The Whoozits of Say What? It was written by a disturbed person named John Webster, a late contemporary of Shakespeare about whom virtually nothing is known, except for the inarguable fact that he was a demented grump who wrote shows that featured tremendous bloodbaths, torture, dismemberment and lycanthropy (Duchess features all of these). Why wouldn't anyone not want to see this? It's not that far from any episode of "24" or "CSI: Miami," and it has the added virtue of the absence of desiccated ghouls like Kiefer Sutherland and David Caruso.

Almost thirty years ago, a playwright and novelist named William Goldman wrote a marvelous book called The Season, in which he reported on an entire year of watching Broadway shows. Despite some clanging, poorly aged comments regarding gays, women and minorities, it is perhaps the finest document I've ever read about the state of live theater at a given moment in time (1967-68). In it, he describes several shows that were produced (even if some of them never made it past previews). I'm listing some of them below, along with some complete fakes that I just made up out of thin air. See if you can figure out which ones are inventions. No peeking! (And you can just be quiet, theater geeks. I'm looking at you, Brad!)

How Now, Dow Jones

Mysteriously absent a question mark in the title, this musical comedy might have a claim on the stupidest title in history, possibly only behind How to Stuff A Wild Bikini. Featuring, among others, Brenda Vaccaro, this show --which had some success--was about a young lady engaged to a fellow who would only marry his fiancee when the Dow average hit 1000. So she goes out and gets pregnant by another dude, and then tells her beau that the Dow hit the mark, and everyone, instead of looking at the newspaper, believes her.

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg

Another outstanding title. Nothing brings 'em in like death! This play actually has the distinction of being really very, very good; it also has the distinction of being an English comedy about a couple whose marriage is slowly but inexorably being torn apart due to their daughter, the eponymous Joe, who when not catatonic, suffers from shocking epileptic fits; the couple's coping mechanism is to perform laceratingly funny comedic skits to the audience about Joe's condition.

The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N

God, I love these titles. This musical smash featured Tom ("Mr. C") Bosley and Hal ("Barney Miller") Linden. It is, I assume, about the education of someone named Hyman Kaplan as told through internet forum flamewars.

Leda Had A Little Swan

Set in the future, this comedy thinkpiece was directed by "My Dinner With" Andre Gregory, and was written by the delightfully-named Bamber Gascoigne. An examination of childhood bestiality, it posited a future where, in order to help the kids cope with puberty, they were assigned animals to have sex with during this difficult time. The last act featured things like windy discussions about the morality of underage sex acts with farm animals.

The Seven Descents of Myrtle

One final horrible title. A justly forgotten Tennessee Williams piece--and he wrote dozens of simply pathetically awful plays--in which a clearly gay Southern farmboy enters into marriage with a blowsy, dimwit stripper in order to screw his musclehead brother out of the farm's inheritance, but then he puts on his dead mother's dress and dies, right before a dam bursts and floods out the farm, but the musclehead and stripper survive. Hooray!

I'll let you know in the comments which ones are the fakes, presuming that you didn't cheat or know up front which ones were real. I'm not even sure I even have a point, other than to dick along about crappy shows through the ages, or their terrible titles. Like I said, I've been doomsaying about the death of live theater for years.

So was Goldman. He said the same exact fucking thing thirty years ago in this book. So maybe we'll hang on a little more. I might have given up, but my wife hasn't, and neither has anyone else in the show they're working on.

Incidentally, John Webster got a shout-out in the popular movie Shakespeare in Love (written in part by Tom Stoppard, who is a very respected playwright indeed). There is a grubby little tatterdemalion in the movie, who is accompanied by a pet rat, and he professes his love for the astonishingly bloody (and really not-so-good) Titus Andronicus to Mr. Shakes: "I like it when they cut heads off. And the daughter mutilated with knives."

Who doesn't like that? Maybe there's life in the old girl yet.

GEICO

GEICO has two basic sets of ads these days: the ones with the gecko and the ones with the cavemen. I know a lot of people who hate these ads (the cavemen ones, anyway), and I can understand. For one, they really are overaired, and for another, they vary wildly in comedic value. (For those of you TV absolutists, the basic thrust of these meta-ads is that cavemen are still living amongst us, and they are offended that GEICO would suggest that getting insurance is so easy that "even a caveman" could do it. This isn't admittedly Wildean territory.)

I know I'm fucking sick and tired of the caveman in the airport (though I still like the little touch that he has a tennis racket) if only because I hate that fucking Royksopp song, which sounds a lot like what Air would sound like if they were transported back in time to 1974 and castrated.

But honestly? There is one caveman ad that kills me every time, and that is the caveman party. Two cavemen are outside the party on the balcony, and one is depressed. As he speaks to friend caveman, it is revealed that despite GEICO's offensive anti-caveman ad concept, he bought insurance with them anyway, resulting in his friends ostracizing him for his betrayal of his caveman brethren. "It's my life, all right?" he bridles hilariously. The whole ad is really fraught with the kind of Seriousness that you'd normally expect to see on something like "Law & Order," which is what makes what happens next so great.

A third caveman bursts out onto the balcony, interrupting this heavy dialogue. "Tina's here; we're getting back together!" he happily informs the first two. "Hey! Give us a minute!" cries friend caveman in frustration.

It is awesome, and I am willing to forgive GEICO the other, much lamer spots for the pure nailing of this particular moment.

It is a goodwill that will instantly be extinguished when ABC--if this dreary network insists on following reported plans to do this horrible thing--actually airs the TV show that is reportedly in development that involves the GEICO cavemen.

Our culture has a rich history of television cavemen: Captain Caveman. The Flintstones. Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. Two were hideous, unfunny cartoons and Phil Hartman was murdered. Are you listening, ABC?

Note: I'm not forgetting Encino Man, although that would be nice. I just would like to mention that Brendan Fraser, who played the title character in that alleged film, went to college with my wife, and that once, some years ago, they stole some guy's dog because he abused it. Hooray!

Freecreditreport.com

If you're not one of those aforementioned anti-TV drones, then you've certainly already got this hellish jingle running in your brain. And you're probably already remembering the astonishingly annoying over-gelled blonde kid who stretches his lips at the camera and says, "I'm thiiiiinking of a number!"

The number this little manque is referring to is, of course, one's credit score. The ad for this bunch of lousy suckpoles is for this fucking website that will, for only $12.95 a month--wait, that's not quite free, is it?--give you your credit report and also email you "changes" to your credit report. What a deal! It isn't free, but hey, I'm willing to trust a website that lies to you right in the URL! And never mind that by law, the credit bureaus are required to provide everyone with a copy of their credit report each year. Or never mind that one can always pay Experian to provide one whenever one wants for fifteen bucks. Or, for forty bucks, you can get the reports from all of them, should you really need to get that information twice or more in the space of twelve months.

Maybe Freecreditreport.com just didn't know any of this! It's probably all a vast mistake and they thought they were actually providing a valuable service! One that's free! Or pretty close to free, at thirteen bucks a month! From their website:

ConsumerInfo.com and Freecreditreport.com are not affiliated with the annual free credit report program. Under a new Federal law, you have the right to receive a free copy of your credit report once every 12 months from each of the three nationwide consumer reporting companies. To request your free annual report under that law, you must go to www.annualcreditreport.com.

No, they knew it all the time. They also knew enough to print that information in helpful blue-on-blue text. Because they just want to help.

Quizno's

I have nothing against Quizno's. In fact, I've never eaten at Quizno's. Actually, I'm not even sure where the nearest Quizno's is. I don't even have anything against their ads, generally: they tend to be a lot of man-on-the-street stuff with ord'nary folks really enjoying their sandwiches and aggressively pointing out how horrible Subway sandwiches are by comparison.

"Now this is prime beef," some ordinary Joe will say while erotically fingering a gorgeous sandwich, resplendently bursting with meat and cheese. Invariably, a Subway sandwich is lying next to it, looking like something fished out of a landfill. The Joe regards it with revulsion: "You can really smell the rat meat. Do they serve these on Death Row?" Nothing special going on here.

But there is a new ad. It's only a small part of the ad, but it is so horrifying, it stands out every time I see it. Again, regular folks are sampling a Quizno's sandwich, and are all uniformly transported to nearly religious experiences when eating these subs. One is a reasonably attractive woman who is holding her half-eaten sandwich insouciantly, perhaps as if it were some sort of metaphoric meat-stick that is somehow inherently enjoyable to hold in one's hand and occasionally put in one's mouth.

Then, unfortunately, she speaks.

"It's not lackin' any meat! And that's what real women need!" Then she laughs.

It isn't the vapid, idiotically charged line that she volunteers; that would be bad enough. Real women want lots of long cock. This is no sandwich for dykes! Hee hee! No, the real horror here is her laugh, believe it or not. I'm not sure I can describe it. It's a multi-toned sort of loathsome giggle, the kind of maniac laugh that every man fears to hear after some ill-considered one-night stand. It's the laugh you dread to hear waking up naked next to a stranger, and it is followed by the phrase, "By the way, my love for you burns me like hot irons. Oh, and speaking of which, I've got a hot iron. Don't move."

If we could hear the cries of bats hunting in the night, it would sound like her laugh. It is the sound of a lumbar puncture. The laugh is the granite grinding of millwheels in Hell as the femurs fall into the stones, and you're the one pushing the wheels, and the Quizno's gal is striping your tattered back with the lash.

And the music you hear as you push along is: "Freeeee creeedit repooort dot com!"

Well, the Oscars are over, and we're nowhere near May. So you know what that means! It's time for Hollywood to clear out the fridge and dump out all the fish heads, rubber carrots and skinned-over stew and put it where all that crap belongs: into the theaters!

Frankly, I love this time of year. If there's nothing quite as awesome as hooting at horrible movies, hooting at advertisements for clearly horrible movies comes in a close second. If the fall shoulder season is the time for dismal weepers, then pre-spring is the time for unleashing its appalling flaccid comedies. Fall is Life As A House. Spring is Cosmonauts Vs. Porky's.

Wild Hogs

Oh, God! Who ordered this?

The majority of my friends all screamed, "Bill Macy! What are you doing?" when the ads for this radioactive zombie turkey came out, and it's still kind of a wonder, given the nightmarish quality of the rest of the cast, featuring drained batteries like John Travolta and Martin Lawrence alongside odious people such as Tim Allen and the incomprehensibly still-living Sklar brothers; Ray Liotta and Marisa Tomei are also skulking around in this thing, no doubt thinking about that few weeks or so when everyone wondered, "Maybe they don't stink," a grace period that ended, well, here.

BONUS: It also features Jill Hennessey, who owes all of her comedy chops to her stint on "Law & Order," where, I have to admit, she was hilarious.

300

THIS! IS! SCHPOTTA! I swear that's what the guy screams in the ads right before he kicks the other dude into a well. Then the bearded guy triumphantly turns to his cadre of nearly-naked compatriots, selects the beefiest, hottest one, and joyously ejaculates onto his chest. Those Greeks!

All kidding aside, it's refreshing to see an openly homoerotic movie about a small group of highly athletic, gorgeous half-naked white guys who are willing to sacrifice their lives to fight against an unstoppable invading force of foreign, occasionally nonwhite devils who have no honor. I get so tired of "issues" flicks.

Blades of Glory

A proud greenskeeper in the twilight of his years (Morgan Freeman) unexpectedly finds love on the links when he meets Helena (Helen Mirren) while mowing the back nine at Greensboro Country Club, only to find himself in conflict when news arrived that his estranged son (Dave Chappelle, in a surprisingly moving dramatic turn) has contracted lupus . . .

No, just kidding, it's just another fucking formula comedy with Will Ferrell and Jon Heder, two of our finest comedic actors who achieve consistent success by steadfastly refusing to play anything other than Will Ferrell and Jon Heder.

Movies like this fucking dogsack just irritate me. Wigs = funny! Sure, they're a step up from ghastly heart attacks like Date Movie or Epic Movie or, and I'm sure it's coming soon, Sad Movie, but that's a lot like saying krill is a step up from plankton.

Dead Silence

This purported screamer from the same sadists who are responsible for the Saw franchise dares to ask the question, "Is anyone using these old props from Magic?" The answer, sadly, appears to have been, "No, go ahead!" Even the tagline is pathetically lazy: "You scream. You die." How novel! I'm so tired of those lame horror movies with deafmutes being silently slaughtered.

We'll probably never get tired of tales of the vengeful dead; this one seems to be about a murdered ventriloquist. That's okay by me, really, as I am a bad horror movie enthusiast, but someday maybe some courageous director will have a film where the dead person comes back and says things like "You know what I miss? Gum. Do you have any?" or "I'd sure like to play some cards."

I can't even figure out the awful rhyming tagline that this movie's ads chant: is it "she'll rip your tongue out at the seams" or "she'll rip your tongue out at the scene"? On the other hand, I don't care.

Must be March. Tune in next week when I report on my own real-life horror experiment: the wife and I are taking a trip on the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train!

STOP THE I-PRESSES! Lo! Big news!

At least two of my tens of readers have alerted me that I have been heralded as one of "The 12 Funniest People on the Internet!" That's nice.

I do have to confess that I do not know these fine discerning people at Valleywag, but I thank them for their vote of confidence. I also note that they quote me making a dick joke, so that's heartening; the world clearly needs more dick jokes, and so I fill a niche. With my dick, apparently. Enjoy, niche! (Hey, it's another dick joke! Worship me.)

But really, if I sound slightly uncomfortable here, it's because 1. I am generally uncomfortable, because I am a neurotic trouble case; 2. I feel like kind of a tool because I don't know over half of those other people (but hey, Hiya, Matthew!); and 3. To be honest? Reading something like this makes me feel sort of like people who say, "Oh, you're a comedian! Say something funny!" And all I can come up with is some stammering nonsense like "Your boobs smell" or an extended riff on canned beets. Or more dick jokes.

OR, PERHAPS, MORE DREADFUL COMMENTARY ON THE AWFUL MOVIES WE WATCH

Oh, most of you know what's coming. This week, stop right here if you simply can't bear to have plot elements ruined for you for fine films such as Crank and The Covenant. Also . . . are you okay? Anyway.

The wife and I settled into watching this object with no real hope at all, but we came alive when the screen lit up with the magic phrase "Directed by RENNY HARLIN." Like sedentary Kool-Aid pitchers, we looked at each other and yelled "OH YEAH!"

But sadly, there were no resounding "yeahs" to be had from this nothing of a movie. It's about a bunch of rich white kids who are actually witches who essentially wield some dull brand of pickup magical powers that can be passed around and dribbled like basketballs, and digitally-rendered spiders that enjoy crawling up people's noses. It suffers chiefly from: well, did you read any of that? I'm actually not really making much up. It also suffers from Indistinguishable Young Actor Syndrome, which I first identified when I saw Black Hawk Down, and I realized that a bunch of young white kids with shaven heads and fatigue uniforms were completely indistinguishable from one another. "Was that the helicopter guy? Or is it the sniper guy? Or is it . . . fuck, I don't know who anybody is." Similarly, in this listless ass-wave of a movie, I found myself asking, "Is that hair guy? Or is it basketball-force-guy?" In the end, I wound up eagerly hoping for more digital spiders crawling into digital nostrils, and, well, as low as my standards are, that's just kind of a bummer.

Our disappointment in that film was leavened by our delight with the pugilistically inane Crank, a movie with the pleasingly and frankly idiotic premise that an assassin--Jason Statham, the man with a face and emotive range of a dented shovel--has been poisoned by a nemesis with some sort of Ancient Chinese Secret potion that will kill him if his adrenaline levels drop too much.

The actor playing the villain in this delirious movie is worthy of note; when he's not leering maniacally, he's punching innocent pillows as he awaits the sure death of the deathlessly energetic Statham; his overacting is so spine-tingling that I contracted meningitis early in the film, right about at the point where Statham Shovel-Face addresses the camera to announce that "It's time to kick some black ass!" BRAVO!

Also in this awesome spectacle is the fresh young girlfriend Amy Smart (who I do miss from the not-very-lamented, short-lived "Smith"). I would be genuinely interested in the conversation she had with her agent when she accepted this role, since right in the middle of the movie, she and Statham have a fight out in public Chinatown, which kind of turns Statham on, so he attacks her, and in one of those Hollywood moments, she initially resists, but then gets SO WEIRDLY TURNED ON that she can't help herself, and blah blah blah, and then he bends her over a newspaper vending machine.

But then he can't get it up. Weird! I've fucked so many hot chicks in Chinatown in broad daylight, and I'm always walking funny. "You can't get it up?" she screams. Statham looks embarrassed, not that you can tell. He looks like he lost a book of stamps. "This is just like you!" Smart wails puzzlingly. It is? Who are you, lady? What is your miserable life like? Can we have a movie about her? After a few excruciating moments, Statham presumably manages to ring up his long-lost hard-on, and finally puts the boots to the still bent-over Smart, while she's stuck with dialogue like "Oh, baby, you're so big!"

Later, in a car chase scene, she gives him a blow job, only to hold up before the inevitable. Statham protests, of course, shovelly, and she says "So you can fall asleep like you always do? I don't think so." Okay, really, at this point I must demand that a movie be made about this woman's backstory. She sounds like Oriana Fallaci and Jenna Jameson on a meth bender. Fittingly, this woman-positive movie includes a scene in which Statham asks another character, "Do I look like I got 'cunt' written on my head?" At this point, the moviemakers cleverly put the word "cunt" on his head in white letters, possibly just in case that their fears that this movie might make people's ears fall off were justified.

In summary, Crank is the finest movie of 2006. You're insane if you don't watch it.

The holidays are over and summer is nowhere in sight! Woo! It's time for everyone to sit glumly and realize that there's absolutely nothing to look forward to for months. I mean, honestly. Valentine's day? For couples, it's a bunch of fucking stress, and for the loners, it's an opportunity to resent the couples.

Hollywood feels our pain, of course. In fact, they enjoy exacerbating it. This is the most horrible time of year for moviegoers, so I feel fortunate that I don't go out to see movies any more. Instead, I sit at home and prejudge them.

Smokin' Aces

Awwww! I always have a soft spot for movies with lousy titles, mainly because they are almost always 1. like the titles, horrible and 2. doomed. (There are exceptions. I cite, for example, Forrest Gump. It was massively popular. I suspect it was also horrible, but I cannot say for sure, as I never bothered to watch it.)

Like the similarly horribly-titled and horribly doomed Lucky Number Slevin, this seems to be another hitman/mobster movie. Which is fine. What's less fine is that the star of the picture is Jeremy Piven. I mean, I have no real beef with Mr. Piven--in fact, that's kind of the problem. I actually don't think of him at all, including whenever he's onscreen. I know I've seen him in a dozen movies or so; it's just that he's so workmanlike and efficient, I never even notice him. He's lik