Sprocket Holed

March 3rd 2011 07:47

Like a white Jaden Smith but rounder.

I felt bad posting stuff I'd written about movies I'd seen that could be had for free on the quartertothree movie podcast delivered orally, so in the interest of delivering better value (also for free), here are choke-sized mini-reviewlets of 10 movies and/or trailers I hereby assure both my faithful readers that I haven't viewed a single frame of:

I Am Number Four - It's like Twilight, but for young girls.

No Strings Attached - Apparently one upside of winning a Best Actress Oscar for a movie in which you make out with a co-star from That 70's Show is getting to follow it up a couple weeks later with another one (co-star, not Oscar).

The Illusionist - I already saw the "non-animated one with Jessica Biel" (which is what I bet her friends call Justin Timberlake).

Justin Bieber: Never See This - 8-year-old girls are so easy. Uh. That came out wrong.

The Mechanic - The second this movie started, I heard Charles Bronson's voice mocking me, then the theater blew up. Weird, because I thought mechanics fixed stuff that blows up.

Rite - Taps into our fears of elderly priests.

The Roommate - It's like Single White Female, but with girls.

Hall Pass - Apparently married guys miraculously forget how to pay for hookers.

Just Go With It - Apparently if you're a sleazy lying piece of shit, the hot platonic doctor friend you've inexplicably never been interested in will squander tons of time, money, and energy helping you trick some other chick into marrying your worthless ass. I have an appointment with my matronly proctologist tomorrow, so this is useful intel.

Cowboys vs. Aliens (the trailer) - Um, Olivia Wilde nude but covered in shadow? How is that not worse than nothing?

Ta-da! For oral gibberish on stuff that I did grudgingly pay for and see, go check out the quartertothree movie podcasts or accost me on the street. Optimal hours: 3:25 a.m.-3:27 a.m.

Brb!

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Triple T: The Tourist, Tron Legacy, and True Grit Mashup Extravapalollercopterz in Low-Def 1D

January 2nd 2011 07:30

Defrag the script.

What do The Tourist, Tron Legacy, and True Grit all have in common besides letter T's and in some cases Jeff Bridges or gondolas? Nothing really. To wit, my "notes," as it were if I would:

The Tourist:

A Scotland Yard detective named Angelina Jolie walks around Venice with a secret smile while some British cops talking French spying on her from a van-cam argue over whether she’s wearing underwear till their boss tells them to be professional and not wear underwear. Angelina’s meeting a man she’s spiritually in love with because he stole a bunch of money from that guy with the "I-am-evil" mole on his forehead from Beverly Hills Cop, Victor Maitlin, and she also loves him 'cause he keeps leaving cryptic notes for her like Tom Cruise left for Cameron Diaz under the omelettes in Knight and Day and Baviwwa Sky. She loves him and the notes so much she burns one instead of taking it with her because she knows the only way her cop foe-colleagues would be able to read it is by using the new burned-letter-analyzer at police headquarters, where she works, but she hopes they won’t think of using it, I guess. She tricks them by running away and being inconspicuous in a crowd of horny Frenchmen, and getting on a train, which the cops chasing her didn’t know the station was for. The note she lovingly burned tells her to pretend a guy who’s her soulmate’s size and build on the train is him, so that everybody’ll kill him instead, and she gets on the train and every guy on there’s the same size and staring at her and wondering whether she’s wearing underwear. One of these 100 guys who all weigh the same is ignoring her and smoking a fake cigarette just like her soulmate and even knows all the right things to say after she tells him all the right things to say so they have chemistry. After she tells him all the right things to say to get her sexually interested, gives him a boat ride, invites him to her hotel room, and kisses him, she then tells him he’s sleeping on the couch. [been on that date.] She also tells him she still loves the thief because he left her another note inviting her to a ball later because balls are low-profile, and therefore not to wear anything too glamorous or provocative. But she’s kinda falling for the math teacher’s boringness, so she abandons him to get killed by the guy with the mole’s Russians and takes a walk to buy some fruit from a fruit cart, but some hit men come to kill the math teacher, whom he tricks by running away and falling onto the fruit cart, which like Reagan the Russians have no answer to. So the math teacher knocks a cop into the water by flailing around comically with a broken toe, so they arrest him and he asks to see someone non-Italian because he’s in Italy but they put him in jail with a guy banging his head against a wall so they can check some facts. Angelina Jolie sympathetically if belatedly tells her cop bosses that she doesn’t want anyone to get hurt, except maybe for the math teacher that she’s already lured into a death-trap free of sex. So the Italian guy handcuffs him and takes him in the dead of night by gondola to the Russians but Angelina Jolie had a hunch which gondola he was gonna use and shows up to save the math teacher by dragging him through the water by a rope at 5 miles an hour while everybody shoots at him. Since she’s the worst cop ever, the police buy her a gown and get her a $5000 hairdo so she can go to the ball and get another dumbass note and screw them over again. She's also tried to ditch the math teacher by using the same rope she saved him with earlier, but he tricks her by buying a suit with some stolen money and by magically knowing where the ball is, so he shows up and knows how to dance perfectly, for which the cops punch him in the stomach and handcuff him to a chair in their HQ where he can interject unwanted suggestions and watch incriminating stuff on monitors and jeopardize their sting operation from a better vantage point. Angelina Jolie gets captured by the mole guy, who asks her to tell him where the safe in the room is or he’ll knock over a couple bookcases, and she doesn’t, so he knocks them over, so she gives up and tells him it’s behind the head of Janice, the Roman goddess of wall-safes, and he demands the combination from her but she doesn’t know it, so the math teacher shows up because he used a safety pin to pick his handcuffs and cross the 10 miles to the hotel room and sneak in through the ledge outside without the cops or the hotel security guys or the Russians seeing him, and he tricks the guy with the mole into threatening to kill both of them, which makes Angelina mouth that she loves him, and he walks suspensefully in slow motion towards the combination lock but before anything can happen, Timothy Dalton shows up from somewhere and tells the cops to shoot everybody, then the math teacher reveals that he’s really been Heath Ledger all along and just pretending to be a math teacher to fuck with the audience, and he paid some other math teacher to trick the cops by wandering all over Italy and leaving cryptic notes and hopefully not getting shot or caught, and the cops who are watching the hotel room on video surveillance somehow miss this reveal but don't mind 'cause he left them a rubber check in the safe, so Timothy Dalton says to let Angelina Jolie and the math thief go since they didn’t commit any crimes, except a thousand of them, and Depp and Jolie get ready to fuck on a boat to celebrate knowing somehow that the cops won’t shoot them any second. Grade: PG-13.

Tron: (the?) Legacy :

At the start, the computer living in the Arclight’s movie screen told me that some scenes I was about to see were in 2D as they were meant to be seen, so I should put on the 3D glasses I paid an extra $8.50 for and leave them on for the whole movie. Thanks, computer. Then a CG-faced thing playing Jeff Bridges tells his kid Sam who’s playing with action figures from the movie Tron that he loves him so much, he’s gotta go into a videogame grid for 27 years to make humans immortal through bio-digital jazz, and disappears for 27 years, which means by my math this movie takes place in 2051 or 1988. I think he had this kid before the first movie takes place even though we don’t see the mom in either movie. Anyway, the kid grows up troubled and sad because he’s a billionaire with his own company called Encom that Flynn named after his mom. Encom's awesomely sophisticated and evil. They're introducing this new app based on Sam’s dog Marvin but he pranks them by debugging it and putting it on youtube and parachuting off the top of the building and getting arrested but the cops let him go instead of shooting him because the next scene’s starting in his garage where he lives with a dog and a bike and eats TV dinners because he’s a maverick, and his dad’s friend Allen Tron (middle name Robo) comes over and tells him he just got a page from his dad’s ghost at the video arcade that no one ever bought or has entered in 27 years because all the games inside have tarps on them, so Sam goes there to see the tarps and puts on some Journey because the guys who wrote this movie wrote Lost but understandably wished they'd written The Sopranos, and he finds a secret door behind an arcade game called Tron No Legacy, and notices that the door he opened is big and finds a magic keypad inside that hasn’t been turned on in 27 years and when he types in the word, “Uhhhh”, he gets teleported inside the magical motherboard where his dad lives as a captive of his younger CG self (because you don’t age in there unless you’re a miniaturized human, in which case your metabolism behaves normally). A machine scans Garrett Hedstrom’s acting ability and sentences him to getting some dancing robot-women taking off his jacket with lasers, which he says "can’t be good," i.e., hot women taking your jacket off with lasers. & they give him a Frisbee with his soul in it that you wear on your back but it’s also a boomerang and they put him in an arena with some other dudes who can’t act and Sam tricks them with his inexperience and confusion, so he makes it to the next round, which he wins by losing and bleeding, so his evil dad, whose name is Clu, takes him out of the games and tells him he fell into his trap and that he’s the one who sent the page so all this would happen 'cause he has a very, very small pager, and Sam’s punishment is to go back into the games where he was already, and die, like he was already about to before this fucking pointless conversation. Luckily they give him a light-cycle to escape on, and Sam comments that he’ll have an aptitude for this because he’s ridden motorcycles before and gotten his parachute tangled up in a lamp-post and been arrested for being a buffoon. So he beats everybody but Clu by teaming up with a plucky program named Regedit, but Olivia Wilde shows up and saves him from the victory ceremony by driving him to his dad’s house, where his dad tells an endless story about how he invented hotter programs called iso’s but his doppelganger killed them all because he wants to control the real world by sending pages. Olivia Wilde’s the last iso, which makes her character fascinating, and she likes books that Sam calls Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy but oddly she doesn’t know what the sun is. Sam wants to fight and die in vain but his dad’s tired so after they eat some pig made out of binary and drink some blue wine with an undertaste of Fortran, they show him the bedroom with the light-cycle-shaped bed they’ve been keeping ready for him for 27 years until his evil twin could send a page, but Olivia Wilde sees Sam moping on his bed through a room with water in it, so she gives him a magic car, and tells him to go see this gay foppish unreliable David Bowie Merovingian named Printer Cable in Tron City at some nightclub. So he drives into town and gives the car away to a bum and meets the blond robot-lady from earlier, who can now talk and move normally, and who introduces him to Printer Cable’s butler, but it turns out he’s really Printer Cable and he just says he’s his own butler to prove he’s cunning, then to prove it some more he starts dancing and laughing and shooting all his customers with his laser-cane instead of Sam, but luckily Olivia Wilde shows up again just in time to dance and smile and she has another vehicle but Clu shows up and blows up Printer Cable and his club as punishment for being his ally. During all this, Olivia Wilde got her arm cut off by a lightsaber but Jeff Bridges brought a vial of arm-juice so while she reboots her arm, they ride a trolley down a beam of light that goes right where they’re going while he tells his son another story about electronics, man. 90 minutes (or half a gigabyte) later they reach the portal that’ll let Sam go back to his normal boring life as a billionaire’s son, but Clu shows up too and he’s mad because he made the "perfect" system even though I need to wear 3D glasses to see it non-blurrily, but Jeff Bridges uses super powers called his outstretched hands to kill him and nuke everything, which wouldn’t have worked in the 27 years he's been there because it wasn’t the end of the movie yet. Olivia Wilde’s turned into a human for some reason so Sam takes her on a bike-ride because his motorcycle jacket’s back on him somehow even though the fem-bots destroyed it and Olivia Wilde stares smiling into the sun till she goes blind, her arms around her soulmate Sam Flynn, while his expression’s thinking about nothing at all.

True Grit:

A 7-year-old kid with pigtails named Mattie Ross with a PhD in horse finance and a minor in mortuary finance goes to a country-western town in the hoki-pokeys because her dad, a maguffin we never meet or know much about, got shot by James Brolin, and nobody went after him because he’s at the bottom of a long list of little girls’ dads who got shot that week, and they’re hanging 3 of the ones they caught but they only let 2 of them say last words because the third dude's an Injun. Since Mattie Ross is skilled at wheeling and dealing with crafty bumpkins, and even though everyone keeps calling her ugly even though she’s beautiful and poised – her name should be Hottie Ross – at the hotel she scores a sweet-ass Presidential suite for the night sharing a bed with an old woman named Grandma Turner who snores and hogs the covers (been on that date). Next day, she asks the sheriff who the best marshall in town is and he says, "Uh, Grandma Turner, but if you’re not too attached to that left arm, you could always try the angry drunk with no depth perception named after a chicken." So upon going to court and listening to Cockburn mumble and lose the case he’s testifying for, she promptly, spunkily hires him to chase James Brolin but he gets tired and walks away. Meanwhile, Matt Damon plays a Texas Ranger named Chuck Norris, and we learn he’s a real square straight-arrow type since he likes to watch 10-year-old girls sleep and contemplate kissing them (the Paranormal Activity demons were based on Texas Rangers). Norris has been chasing the guy who shot her father for 30 years across 90 state lines so he knows what he’s doing but his spurs jingle too loudly for her taste, so she throws in with Cockburn, but the two dicks skip out on her 'cause she’s a 9-year-old girl but her horse Blackie swims good, so Norris spanks her, but at the sight of this Cockburn’s not aroused, so he shoots his gun and the journey gets underway. They lose the trail for a few days shooting at hunks of cornbread but Norris loses so he leaves the group by following at a distance, only it’s not him but an old man with a bear’s head on his head, like Anthony Hopkins in The Edge, and he says stuff after Mattie cuts down a hanged man to see if Cockburn knows him, even though Cockburn could’ve just shot the rope and saved her the climb. & they find out from the crazed babblings of Nostradamus with the bear head that some guys are in a shed, so Cockburn tricks them by having an 8-year-old girl climb onto the roof without making any noise and stuff a blanket that was also up on the roof into the chimney to irritate the men in the shed and make them choke on justice. Cockburn shoots one of them, so they eat some stew that’s just been coated in soot and smoke and spiders living in the chimney shaken loose from the blanket getting wedged in the chimney above the food, but the unshot guy tricks them by not being bound in any way, since they only bound up the hands of the guy who was shot and willing to negotiate and barely able to move as a result of his wounds. The shed guys die and Cockburn and Hottie crouch in the rocks to ambush the gang when they show up to eat soot stew but instead Norris shows up so Cockburn shoots everybody but the one guy he’s been hired to, then drunkenly decides the trail’s cold and it’s time to go home since it would be implausible plot-wise that the bad guys would stay in the area now that they know they’re being pursued. Norris cries and leaves, but not really. The next morning Hottie gets water from the stream but James Brolin’s there and he’s dumb so she tricks him by misfiring her gun and getting captured, and the leader of the gang tells Cockburn to leave so he does, but not really. The Battlefield Earth guy says Hottie’s worth more to them alive so he leaves her alone with the guy who wants to kill her, and goes down into the valley to make sure Cockburn’s not down there planning some sorta iconic 4 vs. 1 jousting sequence. A couple ex machinas later, James Brolin tricks them by not being dead or tied up or under watch, but Hottie tricks him by shooting him again and falling into a pit of rattlesnakes that she wakes up by dragging them closer to her face. But Cockburn shows up again but she gets bitten so he shoots her in the hand to get the venom out, then tries to make it up to her by killing her favorite horse and infecting her hand-wound with his unsanitized knife-blade and lips, so the doctor has to take off her arm and head. 25 years and much less prettiness later, she finally decides to thank him and goes to a wild west show but he died 3 days earlier when he heard she was coming, so she calls one of his friends a piece of trash and walks to a tombstone and then walks away from it forever.

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"The Social Network" review

November 2nd 2010 05:29

The prequel to the Fortran biopic is almost as good as the book!

Michael Cera plays this Harvard nerd named Mark Eisenberg, who somehow scored a superhot girlfriend named Rooney Mara, but she keeps adding “s’s” to words so they split up and he gets back at her by blogging that she has a nice face and wears bras. He designs a social networking site with a blue logo that starts with an "f" but isn't friendster, but he needs his friend Eduardo to write some math on their window for him to hack into the Harvard computer so he can enable photo album tagging. Two blond rowing twins read about him getting in trouble with the Harvard authorities and hacking while drunk, so they hire him to make a website that’s exactly like Facebook except that only blond rowing twins will get to use it, and he steals their idea, so they go complain to the President of Harvard but he tells them they need to go hack into Harvard’s system themselves to gain his approval and his street-smart (i.e., black) secretary goes, “mmm-hmm.” Based on all these legal troubles, Eduardo nobly bankrolls Michael Cera’s new project, and to further help, he takes an internship in New York for some other company while Michael Cera moves to California across the street from Justin Timberlake, who founded “the napster”, which he doesn’t know till his chimney breaks (the neighbor part, not the napster part, which came up over appletinis). Eduardo finds Justin devious and annoying but Michael Cera likes him because Justin lets him go in his bathrobe to Justin’s old bosses and expose himself, which Eduardo was too square to make him do, and also because Justin’s sleeping/doing blow with the blond 15-year-old intern that Cera covets. Cera tells Eduardo to come back out to sign some papers but the papers turn out to be evil, but Cera tells Eduardo it’s his own fault for trusting him and for trusting paper. Just to be a dick even though he can't fight, Justin further twists the knife by giving Eduardo a check for 18 grand but Eduardo gets him back by reading in the paper the next day about Justin getting busted for cocaine possession on his hand, which Justin wriggles out of by testifying that the cops planted his hand in the underage girl. Cera's story arc hits maximum velocity when he hits on Karen from The Office by promising to blog that she’s a C-cup if they ever break up, but she prefers salad, but she lets him down easy by telling him he’s going to lose his case because juries don’t like unsympathetic characters, as opposed to millions of moviegoers. To get over her, Cera sends a friend request to the crazy lady playing the crazy lady and her imaginary alcoholic daughter from Catfish and keeps hitting refresh screen over and over, instead of just inventing a macro that automatically refreshes or better yet doing a movie blog, then some onscreen where-are-they-now text crawls tells us that some money randomly changed hands because the characters' relationship status became Complicated, and that Paul LeMat got killed by a drunk driver.

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"Piranha 3D" review

September 4th 2010 05:54

Eaten worse.

I've seen a pant-load of other movies lately, but since I'm about to see two more tomorrow and hate to waste anyone's time (that's not what blogging's about), I figured I'll just focus on piranha for now and do a broader wrap-up of the whole summer part deux after I "reel" those last two in.
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Summer 2010 Sprocketholed Movie Reviewappoloosa: Now With 25% Longer Blog-Post Titles!

July 8th 2010 07:30

Not all stuffed pink bears are megalomaniacs but why risk it?

Tracking analysts (which as I understand it are soulless marketing wonks who predict how much money a movie will make in its opening weekend but, much like other astrologists, never eat crow even after being proven repeatedly wrong) are calling this a “weak” blockbuster summer because the only two hits so far have been threesequels, Toy Story and Twilight, while everything else has, relative to their arbitrary estimates, “underperformed.” Uninterestingly, both of these hit movie titles have two “T”s in them (not including the “3”’s), yet The A-Team, which didn’t have Mr. T in it, tanked. What’s this tell us? Everything. Or, to be more precise, nothing.
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Sprocketholed Movie Reviews and Non Sequiturs May '010

May 11th 2010 09:46

Undiscovering the element of surprise.

It’s that magical time of the year again, by which for once I don’t just mean an eternity and change since I last updated this space, but also the dawn (or rather, galaxy-rise) of a new summer blockbuster season, the time when studios churn out their most expensive, most rabidly marketed, and therefore best, products of the whole endless year round. Yay! Tentpole billion-dollar 3D CG sequels and tastefully Anglicized sand-legends based on platformer videogames from 20 years ago! Meantime, here are some verbose reviews of cheaper stuff that came out earlier…and Iron Man.
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Official Spring 2010 Non-Thoughts About Movies I’ve Seen And/Or Slept Through Lately

March 13th 2010 07:48

Is her pool-table covered in "heart-felt"?

Don’t worry, I saw more movies and still have this blog, which have no fear I fully intend to continue updating until I’m no longer physically able to insist I’m “press” to disinterested theater concierges (also, it seems that “student” and “senior” discounts are neither cumulative nor honored here in stupid-ass California, “the” movie capital of the western so-called world). Despite the fact that thus far my doubling down on blogging and podcasting about movies continues to be equal parts creatively liberating and unprofitable, I remain hopeful that either of these conditions could change at a moment’s notice. And short of notice, a moment is all I ask.
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"Avatar" review

January 15th 2010 08:13

Pandora's fox.

Avatar is amazing to look at but not much to listen to. The visuals have a vibrant yet languid, almost narcotizing lushness, but it’s hard to believe sometimes that this is the same James Cameron who wrote such pitch-perfect space-marine dialogue for Aliens almost a quarter-century ago. Maybe it’s because this time out the Marines are the bad guys and he doesn’t want to make them too endearing.*
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Xmas Movie Review Round-Up Sumthin Words Max-tacular Cubed

December 11th 2009 10:01

"Papa, what's there to do at the beach again?"

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Summer (and Early Autumn?!) Movie Roundup Review Blogtacular ‘09

October 16th 2009 09:17

If I were a zombie, I'd bite her too. And by too I mean still.

God, I am one terrible blogger. Maybe it has something to do with blogging not really being considered a deadline (or is it more like having a 24/7 deadline?). I’m pretty good with deadlines but don’t exactly seek them out.
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March 2011

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January 2011

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November 2010