While shopping at Meijer yesterday, I noticed that they’ve added a Redbox machine, where you can rent a DVD for a day for $1. Always a sucker for fancy new methods of media consumption, I found myself poring over the list of available movies. There was a reasonable spread of available movies, but none that really captured my imagination… except for one.

I knew full well that it would be bad. But I love the first two Alien movies, and that love obliges me to watch each sequel as it comes out, no matter how increasingly wretched they progressively get. And so it was that, after Angry Teti opened some early Mother’s Day gifts, we retired downstairs to watch… Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. I don’t know why she insisted on watching it with me, but I’m glad she did, because it let us record for posterity some of our commentary as the horror unfolded. Spare yourself the horror of watching this, and instead read on. You’re not missing anything. I’ve added a few timestamps in case you inexplicably want to actually watch the movie:

The opening credits roll…

Angry Teti: AVPR! Avv-purr!

AT: Are those baby predators?

Byzantine: Those are baby aliens.

AT: That was a “good” beginning.

AT: I have no idea what is going on.

[4:30] AT: How would you like to be the actors in this movie? Are those people going to be the main characters?

[5:30] AT: So… they’re not the main characters after all.

AT: This is exactly what I imagined this movie would be like—without human characters, and incomprehensible.

[9:20] B: Think this guy will die a grisly death?

AT: I’d say the chances are good.

[12:00] Laughter…

[12:30] AT: Do you think that kid’s going to die a grisly death?

B: I think so…

AT: This movie has a very 80s vibe to it.

B: Oh boy, I hope I get to watch an alien burst out of that kid’s chest…

B: OK. I’m not watching that. [fast forwards though scene of alien bursting out of an 8-year-old’s chest]

AT: Hey… is that Michele whats-her-face? From 24. Her movie career is launched!

[16:00] AT: Another thrilling scene…

B: This scene makes no sense.

B: You know what would be really thrilling? If we get to watch the aliens repeatedly prey on defenseless homeless people.

AT: You know what else would be really thrilling? If we got to watch the exact same scene over and over again.

AT: This is the opposite of suspenseful.

[18:35] AT: Ah, a suspenseful scene of the Predator tapping his forearm for 5 minutes.

[20:58] Both: Awwwww…

B: I’m in suspense here. Might one of the aliens in those tanks… still be alive?

[22:08] B: The predator inexplicably didn’t bring any weapons himself, apparently, because he’s looting the other predator’s body.

B: I assume we’ll get to see this little girl attacked and brutally killed by an alien in a moment.

[23:10] B: Harsh.

B: “Good” scene.

[24:50] AT: This is an homage to the final scene in The Third Man.

B: How far down the sewer did that guy throw the keys, anyway? He dropped them down the sewer grate, and they’re exploring the entire sewer system in search of them.

B: Do you think something scary might happen here?

AT: Ah, probably not.

AT: And how did he pick that spot to look for his keys?

B: Maybe that funny-looking “rat” took your keys. Why not follow it?

[29:20] AT: What’s he doing now?

B: The predator is getting rid of all traces of… ah, I don’t know.

AT: Why is he killing that guy?

B: Unclear. But I hope this movie will involve more killing of innocent defenseless humans.

B: With this many characters, I guess anyone can die and there’s a mild level of surprise in it.

AT: So he takes care to get rid of all those traces, but then he leaves the giant skinned body there?

AT: That guy is like, “I’m getting dressed in my truck!”

B: “I saved my shirt for out here.”

AT: This doesn’t get any more interesting the more we see of it.

[34:00] B: All the male characters are completely interchangeable.

B: If I hear that whipping noise one more time when something looks around…

B: Could they be more subtle in calling attention to the corpse-evaporating thing?

[36:50] AT: Well?

B: There’s a huge amount of sizzling and gurgling going on, given that this is supposed to be a silent stalking.

B: Well, that was actually slightly cool.

AT: I like how that van just drove by as the street was exploding around it.

B: The predator explodes up through the street, and then he turns on the stealth device.

[40:35] [Laughter]

B: What is it with the drawing-out of the killings?

AT: Another enthralling scene of people sitting around looking concerned.

[42:00] AT: It’s the alien alarm!

AT: I’d love to see somebody stop and slowly look over their shoulder where the alien is waiting one more time.

AT: Oh good. These two again. They’re going into… the school? Oh, the swimming pool.

B: She positioned herself by the clock to set that line up.

AT: I’m going to go get some Diet Coke. Don’t pause the movie, I don’t think I’ll miss anything.

[47:00] AT: Which one of them got killed?

B: Unclear.

B: This is a ripoff of a scene from Aliens.

AT: Are the aliens interfering with the radio reception now?

[52:00] AT: This is a very tall tree.

[53:00] B: One of the main characters just said “Hey, people are dying.” And another one just said “This plan is stupid.”

AT: So… the police don’t have any weapons? The police are breaking into a pawn shop to get weapons.

AT: What’s on fire?

AT: Who is this now?

B: The army.

AT: Laughs

B: Ah, there’s the old “slowly turn around to face the alien” trick again.

B: They’re going to the pawn shop too?

AT: Everybody meet at the pawn shop! It has everything we need to defeat the aliens! Including Old TVs!

[58:00] B: [the alien enters the newborn ward of a hospital and eyes the babies there] You have got to be kidding me. This is the worst movie I’ve ever seen.

B: OK. I’m not going to watch this. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I refuse to watch it. [Fast forwards]

AT: Why is the predator attacking the humans?

B: OK, I’m not watching this either… [fast forwards again]

[1:05] AT: Those teenagers are still with them?

AT: Well, the predator’s getting serious now. He’s got… a thing.

AT: What good is a helicopter going to do anyway? It can only carry a couple of people.

[1:08] AT: “Here, take this… thing.”

[1:10] AT: This is an awkward moment.

AT: Why are they protecting Kelly? Who cares about Kelly? Does she know how to fly a helicopter? She does not look like someone who knows how to fly a helicopter.

AT: Where are they? Why are they in the morgue?

B: Unclear.

B: You know the predator is a super badass when he kicks in the hospital door instead of just opening it.

B: What’s going on exactly?

AT: I’m not sure. I forgot to watch for a minute.

AT: Who was that who just died?

B: One of the characters.

AT: As long as it wasn’t Kelly.

AT: What is that? Is that another predator?

B: No. The main monster in this movie is a combination predator/alien called the Predalien.

AT: [Incredulous laughter] Who calls it that?

B: Oh no!! The alien’s got the corpse remover liquid!!

B: Who was that who just died?

AT: Looks like their helicopter pilot has just been killed.

B: You’ve got to give them credit for killing off the character they set up as the main hero.

B: The alien is TOTALLY GONE. It’s safe. It went down that hallway there. It is nowhere to be seen.

[1:16] AT: This is a very, very small town.

B: His name is Dallas? A reference to the first Alien movie, I suppose.

AT: Did he figure out how to work the predator gun?

B: Apparently.

AT: What is Dallas going to do?

B: Unclear.

AT: He’s calling the aliens names now.

AT: See, this person knows how to fly the helicopter.

B: Wait, maybe this is Kelly?

B: “F— you?” That was the laziest imaginable one-liner.

AT: There’s the predator. Or is that the predalien? The predator has a whip thing now.

B: What could be less exciting than watching these two things fight each other?

AT: I can’t even tell which is which.

B: You know, it really is hard to tell which is which.

[1:23] B: It is not possible to follow what is going on in this scene.

AT: Maybe they’re going to kill each other. Dramatic!

[1:24] AT: The nuke seems like overkill. Look at them outflying the nuclear blast!

AT: What are they… doing?

AT: So, the army killed the whole town, but they’re sending in a medevac for this one guy.

[1:26] AT: Oh my gosh. [groans]

B: This music is a complete ripoff of the Star Trek 2 theme music.

[1:27] [Shocking ending and closing credits] [Laughter]

AT: Well. That was the worst movie I’ve ever seen. The worst movie. In every way.

B: It managed to be terrible and kind of mean-spirited at the same time.

AT: The Mystery Science Theater with the lobster was better than this movie. Oh my goodness. I don’t understand how this movie got made. Did somebody involved with this movie think that it was good?

B: This was a really bad movie.

AT: I thought Alien Resurrection was bad, but this was REALLY REALLY bad.

The scene: While watching some show at hulu last night, we got the opportunity to view this commercial about 14 times. I found it easy enough to ignore, but on about the 3rd or 4th go-round, I was recalled from my reverie by this comment from Byz:

Byz: I don’t understand this commercial.

AT: [peers at screen] I think they want you to buy a car.

Byz: Like, I don’t understand the words he’s saying.

[AT listens intently]

Commercial: One door for “buzzin’”…One door for, yeah, you…

AT: The car has four doors?

Commercial: …It’s car…

Byz: [Affecting accent of John Rhys-Davies in the Indiana Jones movies, specifically the line “You are named after the dog?”] One door for crazy…One door for you…Is car!

AT: What is car? Is thing with doors!

Epilogue: Apparently, a “shwayze” is a person. And it remains to be seen whether the key to the car-buying hearts of Gen Y is the presence of four doors, and the absence of indefinite articles.

Short Cuts: Actually, I’m not sure if it’s accurate to say that Everybody Loved this one, since probably a lot of people have never heard of it. I wish I hadn’t.

According to rottentomatoes, the critics loved it, at least. Of course, they hardly had a choice, since it was the work of a couple of famous guys. Which makes me quite the Philistine to be taking exception to it (but not literally).

The movie also contains a boatload of semi-famous people of the quirky variety, including: everyone’s favorite wannabe 9-year-old Hindu boy, Tom Waits; the pleasant-voiced Andie MacDowell, who plays the only pleasant (and indeed saccharine-sweet) character in the movie; and a little more of Julianne Moore than I signed on for, which, for me, cast a shadow over my enjoyment of the simple pleasures of Benny and Joon (which came out the same year, go figure).

The conceit of the movie is that a whole bunch of parallel stories involving different configurations of characters is going on at the same time. The characters involved in each story don’t know the other characters, for the most part, but they are all connected in some way. For example, one of the characters runs over the little boy of another character with her car, and kills him. The paths of the characters involved in this incident never cross again.

The other character connections which occur in this movie are less pleasant than this one, however.

I’m giving this buddy 2.5 stars because it’s quite possible I’d like it better if I saw it today. However, I don’t think my mental health will every be stable enough for me to willingly plunge into such a dark vortex of anguish and despair from which their is no escape. Part of the problem is the way that the movie was sold to me, which was that all the characters lead terrible lives until a major even occurs, which turns all of their lives around. This wasn’t the case at all, however, which I think was the point of the movie, and if I’d been prepared for that I might have appreciated it more.

Also, in general, I need to like at least a couple of characters in order to like the movie, tv show, or book in which they appear, and none of the characters in this movie are even remotely likeable. Perhaps this was the point of the movie, maybe, rather than trying to find the humanity within the characters, the filmmaker was trying to deny the existence of humanity; to point out that our worst fears are, in fact true: there is neither any ultimate meaning to the world nor any solace to be found in those around us. Even fleeting, temporary pleasures, which seem to be all that is left, become blunted, drowned, and lost, in an overwhelming flood of banality. There is no God, and even the existence of other people and the world around us is worse than questionable: it is irrelevant. It’s an existential nightmare: the only true reality is ourselves, and it is up to us to create our own meaning, but it turns out we don’t have the right equipment to do so.

Or maybe not. Another problem with my viewing of this movie is that I was around 19 at the time, which is pretty much synonymous with a lack of reasonableness in my actions and judgments. You might be able to find some sort of meaning in this movie, but then again it might be just an agonizing journey to nowhere.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall was a pretty funny movie with a few laugh-out-loud moments. The rest of the audience agreed, though most of their laughs were directed at the full-frontal wang nudity.

Ok, so is 2008 going to be the year of the comical wang on the big screen? It’s only April and weens have already drawn big laughs in Walk Hard and now in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I was at both and the laughs were big. Laughs = cash, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few more fellas in movies in the near future. Will they last? Will they lose their comedic value? When the wang-shock-value is over, where do we go next? Anus in 2009? Boners in 2010?

P.S. I laughed too.

I caught the first half of 21 the other day, before being called out to pick someone up. The closest I ever came to leaving a movie before this was when Will Smith connected to the alien ethernet in Independence Day.

The 10.5 I managed to see was interesting in the formula “guys working the system and avoiding a beat-down” sort of way. It was 50% of a fun watch and had all the right energy soundtrack in all the right “will he get away with it” moments. I don’t feel compelled to immediately sit through the first 10.5 again to get to the last, however, so apparently I don’t find it 100% stellar … and besides, that’d be like 31.5, which is just weird.

Four Weddings and a Funeral: I don’t really hate this one as much as some of the other Movies I’ve Hated that everyone else Loved. I just sort of didn’t like it, and couldn’t figure out why everyone else did so much.

I guess the main problem is that I don’t like Hugh Grant, at all. I never have, and he’s at his blinkiest and phony-harmless-slimiest in this one. I do like Andie MacDowell, but mostly because she has a pleasant voice and always has a nice smile on her face every time you see her. But I would not like the line “Is it raining? I hadn’t noticed” no matter how pleasant the voice doing the uttering.

I could also do without the big speech about how much Andie’s character loved her husband, “Hamish” (what kind of a name is that? “What is that I taste? It seems kind of Hamish”), followed by her leaving him with no explanation to take up with The Blinkinator. I also don’t buy the breaking-up of a wedding, no matter how sweet and pure-hearted the disabled fellow responsible for it, as a major triumph for Love and Romance. This movie is kind of an anti-romance really, at least anti-the concept of the possibility of romantic love as more than a temporary diversion. Actually, if it had been marketed that way, I might have liked it better.

Anyway, in trying to remember more about the movie to type smack about, I just read the “memorable quotes” on imdb. I don’t remember any of them. I guess that just about says it all.

I can barely put into words how dumb this game is, but I’ll try.

So literally all that is in this normal board game size box is a DVD in a cardboard slip case, a humorously small and uncomfortable heating pad (minus the heat) type thing that says “Hot Seat” on it, and about 40 “tokens” which look identical to poker chips.  The instructions for the game are printed on the inside of the box, and spoken to you by Howie Mandel via the included DVD.

So here’s the game (according to the rules they provide).  You can play individually or in teams, and each turn Howie Mandel sarcastically makes some sort of quip about your score and questions whether or not you’re ready for the sheer intensity of the coming round.  You then see a statement of some sort (A banana is a type of fruit) and you have to quickly answer whether or not that is fact or crap.  If you get it right, you are then asked another one.  If you get 4 right in a row, you successfully “Beat da bomb” (the word “da” in place of “the” is used with reckless abandon).  You then get tokens for however many questions you answered correctly (what the bonus is for “beating da bomb” remains to be seen).  You are then made fun of by Howie, just to simulate what it would be like to play the game with your alcoholic dad.
But here’s the catch.  The other team (or individual) is supposed to read the statements to you, while you sit in a chair topped with the cheap pad labeled “hot seat” which faces away from the television.  And the other thing is, the person reading the statement to you has about 6 seconds to read the question to you and enter in your answer correctly, or “da bomb” explodes.  What is to prevent the other person from reading slowly or entering in the wrong answer?  Nothing.  Needless to say, this was the first rule we abandoned, logically having the person who’s turn it was hold the DVD remote.

Every once in a while there’s a special round in which you answer four right away before entering.  I don’t remember how it works but we decided to have those rounds be the “you just won 4 tokens” rounds.

The ultimate goal?  To get 15 tokens.  That is literally it.  There is nothing else to the game but having Howie Mandel relentlessly make fun of your score or your poor fact or crap performance between each turn.  It’s almost as if he’s mocking you for having purchased the game in the first place.

And the price for this?  33.95, when on sale.  I have to imagine that each game costs maybe $2.00 to manufacture, and they probably gave Howie Mandel a couple thousand bucks to put on a jump suit and say stupid lines for half a day, so with that kind of a mark up, they need to sell about 100 to break even (though maybe they gave Howie a lot more, who knows).

So if you’re a mid fifties person who needs to get a birthday present for a nephew or niece, and you think that Howie Mandel is a real hoot, and you’re blown away that you can play an actual game on the DVD, then this is the game for you.  Otherwise, it will make you hate America.

The Wicker Man and I came into the world the same year: 1973. Therefore, I spent my early years marinating in this decade of questionable aesthetics. It is possible that my baby pictures would have been as cute as baby pictures are wont to be, if they were not defaced with the clothing of the day, which without exception aped the hues of long-dead plant life. It is possible that children today watch educational videos which do not scorch the visual as well as intellectual sensibilities of their viewers, as did those produced in that miserable decade. It is possible that something good happened some time during the 1970s, but you would not know it looking at the documentary evidence available from that time.

To summarize, I believe that I have taken enough 70s-era punishment. Which is (one of the reasons) why we had to turn off The Wicker Man long before we got to the exciting part. (Was there an exciting part? I would not believe it were you to swear it on a stack of the scripture of your choice).

There are many grounds upon which I might object to an orgy scene in a film; but in no case other than The Wicker Man are the chief grounds of my objection the sheer tedium of it.

In the normal course of things, I might well object to an interminable bawdy song sung by a group of men whose ages average approximately 80 and who are dressed in the very worst and most hideous of garb that I recall from my early years. And normally I would eschew the adjective “gay,” due both to its vulgarity and its implied disrespect to homosexual persons. However, in The Wicker Man, I can think of no other adjective which could possibly call to mind a fraction of the nature of the little dance that these elderly men do while singing the above-mentioned interminable bawdy tune. Gay porn would be less gay than that little dance.

Although nude females have little interest for me anyway, I might have to acknowledge the skill of a filmmaker who was able to create a skillful nude scene, which evoked either sexuality, or threat, or sadness, or anything, anything at all really. Instead, the scene of the naked girl dancing gave me the impression of how, perhaps, a husband might feel, who had long become inured to his wife’s physical attractions and simply wishes she would hurry up and get dressed, as we are going to be late for the game. Seriously: put on a bathrobe and go get your shower, already, before I have to drive my daughter to her freshman year in college.

There is no doubt some truly talented folk musicians out there. None of them had anything to do with the creation of The Wicker Man’s soundtrack, however. Thankfully, I have mostly blocked out all memory of the musical monstrosities of this movie, but just the lingering impression makes me want to drown out the sound by banging my head against a wall.

Boring, stupid, a visual blight, horribly acted, painfully dull…I hated this movie. Hated it.

I should probably stay off the internets. I can already hear the crabbing about last night’s Lost inside my head. Spoilers below.

“We already knew it was going to be Michael on the boat! And that Tom was gay! This didn’t tell us anything new about the island monster! Boohoo, where’s Sawyer and Kate?”

Okay, denizens of message boards everywhere, make your own tv show.

Sorry, I’m feeling a little cranky today.

Actually, I thought this was another great episode. I like it when the Lost folks break the usual formula and do something gutsy–like the Niki and Paolo episode, and last night’s nearly-all-flashback episode. My only objection was that Lost was getting a little too dark. Just think of lovable Michael of first season, who just wanted to be a good dad, a cartoonist, and save Sun from Psycho Jin. And now look how he’s ended up. What an awesome actor, let’s hope he survives for a while longer.

I guess one other issue is that the episode was a bit heavy on the exposition. Thanks, Sawyer, for letting us know that Michael killed Ana-Lucia and Libby, and betrayed you to the Others. You may go now.

I really love seeing the deceased characters return in flashbacks, and/or guilt-induced hallucinations. Good old “Tom.” RIP, Rousseau, I hope they find a way to get you back too.

I’m trying to avoid blathering on about how much I’m enjoying Lost this season, but I’m really impressed at the way they are keeping the main plot interesting: now that we know so much about the others, we find layers upon layers of other sinister forces at work.

And I, for one, am glad that we haven’t heard much out of Sawyer/Kate for a few episodes.