CleverDonkey.com …Musings, Commentary, Opinions, and Drivel

Sympathy for the Bossman

When we heard that Mike Judge had a new movie coming out, we knew it was a must see for us on opening weekend.  His previous films Office Space and Idiocracy are considered to be works of genius in our house, even though it took us a while to discover and appreciate the masterpiece-i-ness of them both.  But we now know and love them, and regularly quote both on a daily basis.

For those unfamiliar, Office Space told the story of downtrodden workplace drones who rise up to throw off the shackles of their e-dentured servitude  and stick it to the man, while Idiocracy tells the story of the evolutionary decline of mankind into mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, mono-syllabic morons.

In counterpoint to those films (particularly Office Space), Extract tells the story from the perspective of “the man”.  Jason Bateman plays Joel, who is the owner of a successful food flavoring extract company.  While he was in college he developed a unique way of creating extracts that retain their flavor when heated, leading to tastier results.  Through years of hard work he has parlayed his breakthrough into a moderately large factory, which he runs from his office overlooking the shop floor.  He’s so successful that General Foods is sniffing around and thinking about buying him out lock, stock, and barrel, which would allow Joel to retire a relatively wealthy man.

However, even with his professional success, Joel is not happy.  He and his wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig) have drifted apart, and Joel finds himself lusting after the flirty new company employee Cindy (Mila Kunis) who seems to be fascinated by the world of flavoring extracts.  But, Joel is honorable and can’t bring himself to be unfaithful, so his spacy bartender friend Dean (Ben Affleck) suggests that he secretly hire a gigolo to seduce his own wife.  If she goes for it, then Joel is then morally free to also cheat, and if she doesn’t go for it then he’s learned a valuable lesson about his wife’s fidelity.  So, in a fit of chemically-enhanced miscalculation, Joel hires the himbo gigolo to “clean his pool”.

And then – everything goes wrong for Joel.  His wife Suzie jumps at the chance to jump the new pool guy’s bones, Joel’s Idiocracy-like workers perform a ballet of OSHA violations that result in a sprung bolt performing a half-masculation on his floor supervisor Step (Clifton Collins, Jr.), who decides to sue big, which scares General Foods into delaying their buyout until the lawsuit is settled.  Add to that the fact that Cindy, the cute new employee, is also a sociopathic grifter who is pilfering the purses of her workmates while she dates Step and pushes him to sue for bigger money (which she presumably plans to get her hands on).

Jim Adler, the Texas Hammer!

To help Step score the big civil case win, Cindy hires bombastic lawyer Joe Adler (Gene Simmons – yes, *that* Gene Simmons) after seeing his number painted on the back of a bus stop.  As an aside for those of you not from Texas, “Joe Adler” appears to be loosely based on real-life, bombastic lawyer Jim Adler, self-described as “The Texas Hammer”.  The picture of him to the right is from his web site.

And to top it all off, Joel’s ungrateful and woefully ignorant employees think that they’re entitled to some of the money they assume he’s about to make by selling to General Foods, and decide to stage a walkout if they don’t get stock options prior to the deal.

So, here’s a man who had it all, built a company using his own brains and hard work, beautiful wife, nice house, and a lottery-sized buyout coming, and early retirement while he’s still young enough to enjoy it.  But then it all starts falling apart.

Suffice it to say that, by the end, things get wrapped up pretty satisfactorily.  The acting and directing are solid, and the script is pretty funny.  There isn’t a huge message being delivered in this film, unlike Idiocracy, but it’s a good message – don’t sacrifice the truly important things in life in the pursuit of “success”.  Success is happiness, not wealth or material things. 

The other message is that, while blue-collar types might not realize it, in many (if not most) cases the bosses that they like to insult and ridicule are their bosses because of hard work and smarts, not because of who they know or because they got lucky.  Hollywood has a tendency to demonize bosses, and it’s refreshing to see a film where a business owner is shown as a sympathetic character instead of a money-grubbing soul-sucker.  In the film you can see that Joel cares about his employees, he strives to run a safe plant, he encourages his employees to improve their positions, and he really does want to make the best darn extracts that he can.

So, while I’d put this as Mike Judge’s third best film, that’s still a big compliment.

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Prawns a la Apartheid

If you are planning to see District 9, I urge you to stop reading reviews and just go see it.  It will best be seen with as little foreknowledge as possible, so that the film can be experienced without preconceptions.  I will warn you that this film is not for the squeamish, and the R rating is well deserved.  I don’t recall there being any sex or nudity, and the language isn’t all that bad, so you can infer from that where the R rating comes from – the violence, evil, and inhumanity.

You’ve been warned, the information starts flowing below – seriously, just go see it, then come back here.

Really, just go.

Okay, for those still reading, this film as that rare cinematic gem in that it is both completely unique and absolutely entertaining.  It took a few minutes to get my bearings as the film started, but I was quickly absorbed into the story and felt like I didn’t blink for the entire running time, except when diverting my eyes from the carnage on the screen.

We jump into the middle of a story where a gigantic alien spacecraft is hovering of Johannesburg, South Africa, and has been there for 20 years.  The aliens on board, numbering in the millions, were “rescued” by earthlings and put into a holding camp, which over the years devolved into a ghetto.  The aliens are referred to, derogatorily, as “prawns” because of their resemblence to roughly human-sized shellfish.  The prawns from the ship seem to be all be from a worker-class, and aren’t particularly smart, communicative, creative, or industrious.

They do have language, consisting of very alien-sounding clicks, grunts, and squeals, and they can understand English, and the human governmental workers that interface with the aliens can also understand their language.  The prawns are enamored of cat food, and the local Nigerian criminals are only too happy to provide it to them, at a price.  The Nigerians are also accumulating alien weaponry, even though each weapon is genetically locked and can only be fired by the aliens.

As the movie opens, the residents of Jo’burg are tired of having the aliens around, and a private conglomerate called MNU has been contracted to build a new settlement for the prawns 200 miles outside of town, and then forcibly relocate the aliens there.  Technically, the aliens have rights and there is at least a superficial attempt to try to make it all seem legal, but the aliens don’t really understand what an eviction notice is, so the logistics are kept on track by private mercenaries, who are only too happy to…uh…incent the prawns into cooperating.

MNU puts a man named Wikus Van De Merwe in charge of the move.  Wikus is a middle-management type, not really too bright or ambitious, not really evil, either…just sort of banal and thoughtless.  He doesn’t seem like he’s spent any time examining the awe-inspiring fact that humanity has discovered another sentient race, and that race is advanced enough to send a ship to our planet.  He seems about as engaged and caring as a farmer would be about his cows…yes, he cares, but only because it’s his job to care, and that care isn’t really very deep or profound.

Wikus and his team have to go through the formality of getting the prawns to “sign” their eviction notices, so that there is an audit trail showing that their forced move to the new camp is fully legal.  He goes about this job with the sort of manufactured enthusiasm that any middle-manager would have for an unpleasant and thankless task that nonetheless got him a small promotion of sorts.  He grins and bears it, tries to keep up a good attitude for his team, and even has a camera crew tagging along to document the relocation.

The crux of the story revolves around a particular alien who is definitely *not* a hive-minded worker.  He’s obviously a leader within the alien community, and he has a small son who he watches over with great fatherly care and devotion.  He’s also been on a 20 year mission to gather enough fuel to get his small command module to launch and get back up to the mothership so that he can rescue his people and go home.  He has just gathered the last of the needed fuel when he and his team are rousted by the MNU mercenaries for relocation.

Wikus, while involved in rousting this alien, becomes infected by an agent that starts a transformation of his DNA – to the point where one of his arms turns into one of the tentacled-flippers that the aliens have.  Interestingly enough, his DNA gives him the ability to arm and fire the alien weaponry, which makes him very valuable to MNU – valuable in the sense that he is a mass of tissue with DNA they can harvest to create hybrid soldiers capable of using the superior alien firepower.  However, the entity known as Wikus Van De Merwe is valueless, a complication, a glitch to be fixed as MNU moves forward to reap their billions in defense contracts.

And therein lies the story.  Wikus wants nothing more or less than to go back to being human, and to hold his wife again.  The head alien tells Wikus that if he helps recover the fuel and get them to the mothership, he has medical equipment that can re-humanize him.  MNU, however, will stop at nothing to recover the tissue culture known as Wikus Van De Merwe so that they can continue to harvest him.

The footage shot by the film-crew-within-a-film is used to book-end the movie in news report/documentary style, including interviews with key players, excerpts of newscasts, etc.  As you may have been able to infer from the above description, the storyline is quite unique.  The effects are outstanding – after a couple of minutes the digitally rendered aliens simply become characters.  The hovering mothership, the size of a city itself, looks real – or as real as such a site would look considering the unreality inherent in a city-sized alien ship hovering over a major metropolitan area for two decades.  And the weaponry is suitably dazzling and lethal.

Put it all together and it’s a movie unlike any I’ve ever seen.  There are parts that call to mind other movies – Aliens, Men in Black, Independence Day, Robocop…hell, even Office Space.  But it’s not slavish copies of those, it’s a unique pastiche of those kinds of films that came before it, but with the result being something completely fresh, and definitely worth fighting the crowds and paying the full price for an opening weekend viewing.

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An Eagle? More Like A Vulture...

So, Michael Vick is out of prison after serving time for illegal dog-fighting, and is returning to the NFL as a member of the Philadelphia Eagles.  I believe that everyone deserves a second chance, and while I would prefer to have never seen or heard of this chump ever again, I can’t begrudge him the fact that he’s served his time and is going on with his life.
 
For a refresher on his recent history, see these previous posts:

Michael Vick Needs Psychological Treatment
Michael Vick Should Be Thrown To The Dogs

Although it’s rare, I’m sure that it’s possible for people to undergo fundamental changes in their psyche, and it may be the case that Vick has done exactly that – he had it all and then lost it all, and his fall from grace could have been enough to lead to a soul-searching epiphany wherein he achieved the enlightenment to understand that it is simply and completely wrong to  torture and kill animals that are trusting and innocent.

But I seriously doubt it.  Tigers rarely change their stripes, and people rarely change their fundamental nature.  Torturing dogs ranks up there with beating children in my book – not that the life of a dog is comparable to the life of a child, but that the mental state of a person who can inflict pain and horror onto a being that is completely dependent on, trusting of, and subservient to them is the same in both cases.

But, again, everyone deserves a second chance.  Many people who are violent to their own children are passing on what they learned at home growing up, and if they take steps to break the cycle that is an admirable thing.  Michael Vick has claimed that the torture and abuse of dogs was part of his culture growing up, and I hope that what has happened is that he has seen the light and realized that what he did was horrific. 

However, my fear is that his essential nature hasn’t changed, and all he has learned is that he shouldn’t have gotten caught dogfighting, and that he will simply find some other outlet for his narcissistic sociopathy that will lead to his re-downfall.  I am not wishing for this to happen, and hope that it does not…but I fear that it is the most likely outcome.  I just hope nobody else gets hurt in the process.

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L'Chaim...and the turkey, it's kosher?

Funny People is the latest film from adult-comedy king Judd Apatow, and only the third that he has directed, after The 40 Year Old Virgin in 2005 and Knocked Up in 2007.  If you’ve seen either of those, or Superbad or Forgetting Sarah Marshall (where he was the producer), you should have a read on whether or not you’ll enjoy this new film.

George Simmons (played by Adam Sandler) is a successful star who parlayed his beginnings in stand-up comedy into a mega-career and a string of blockbuster films.  However, as the film opens, George receives bad news about his health, and faced with the gaping maw of his own mortality, begins to re-examine his priorities.

He picks Ira Wright (played by Seth Rogen) out of the string of aspiring comics performing for free at the local comedy club and asks him to take over as his personal assistant, and also write some jokes for him.  It’s difficult to tell if this move is selfish (he needs somebody around so his loneliness doesn’t consume him) or generous (he wants to pass on his comedic legacy by helping out a struggling nobody), and Adam Sandler doesn’t give us a clear read, because he plays the character as a realistic-feeling combination of neuroses, talent, affection, and dickish-ness.

Seth Rogen continues to be able to play a believable every-schlub, in spite of his rocketing stardom, and he imbues Ira with a sympathetic combination of self-doubt, opportunism, diligence, and nascent talent.

Part of the realistic feeling in their relationship may come from the fact that Judd Apatow wrote the script, and back in the day he and Adam Sandler were struggling unknowns together, but Sandler’s star caught fire long before Apatow’s, and it feels like some of the real-life dynamics they experienced have been folded into the story. 

I mean, if you look backward from today, you see that both Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow have parlayed their abilities into larger-than-life careers making people laugh, and back in the beginning they must have known that they were roughly equivalent in the talent department.  The fact that one of them (Sandler) hit it big before the other (Apatow) can easily be interpreted as luck, and the inexorable hand of fate plucking one of them from obscurity while leaving the other behind had to introduce some kind of tension and ill-feelings into their relationship (unless they were both saints).

And that dichotomy is played out in startling contrast in this film.  Ira Wright sleeps on a pull-out sofa in an apartment he shares with two other guys, one of whom (Jason Schwartzman) has scored a recurring role in a throwaway sitcom and finds endless ways to flaunt his new liquidity in the faces of his roommates, and the other of whom (Jonah Hill) is faring much better on the stand-up circuit and claims the other bedroom by virtue of being able to pay rent.

This leaves Ira as the bottom dog, working at a deli counter, struggling to get the comedy clubs to let him perform for free – hanging around and filling in for no-shows, and doing anything he can to try to hone his craft in front of an audience.  In contrast is the life that George Simmons leads – a house the size of a small apartment complex, meticulously tended grounds, beautiful pool with a beautiful view, and an endless stream of beautiful women who want nothing more or less than to be able to say they have slept with George Simmons.

But as the movie unfolds, we learn that George has no friends – no real friends.  He’s awkwardly estranged from his parents and sister.  Yes, he beds an endless stream of girls, but as he himself says – “They always leave disappointed.”  The scripts he gets are all throwaways, typecasting him from previous roles and/or trying to lure him into sequels.  Oh, and he threw away the only girl he ever loved by virtue of his constant infidelities.

And the story progresses from there.  I won’t give any more of it away, but it goes in directions that I would not have predicted, and, counter-intuitively for a story where the two main characters are named George and Ira,  it ends on a discordant note.  Not an unsatisfying one, but an unexpected and somewhat bittersweet final chord.

The good news is that while the story is serious, the people in the story are…well…funny, as the title says.  It’s refreshing to see people in a film who talk like people do in real life – referencing things that are happening here and now, companies and celebrities, events and reference points that are up-to-the-minute and sound like things you’d hear in a gathering of your own funny friends.  Well, maybe with a few more dick jokes – make that a lot more dick jokes, but why quibble.

By the end, the laughs have been laughed and the learnings have been learned, and it’s an engaging and enjoyable journey.  Funny People doesn’t raise the bar for Apatow, but it also isn’t a misfire – it feels like a necessary step in the evolution of a storyteller who has really only directed three films, including this one, and so could still be considered a newcomer, regardless of the fact that his name has become synonymous with the renewed genre of R-rate comedies.  I, for one, can’t wait to see the next Apatowian film.

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We call this "The Loser Bench"

It would not be possible for me to recommend “The Hangover” highly enough.  This movie is laugh-out-loud funny from beginning to end, and is driven by the script, the story, and the situations, not by “stars”.  Hollywood has gotten lazy about making deals instead of making movies, and have developed a pattern of putting A-list stars into films with mediocre scripts and huge advertising budgets, and just expecting us to show up because we don’t know any better.

Well, now you know better, at least about this film.  Parts of it are raunchy, but that’s not its purpose – the raunch is essential to the plot.  And the plot sounds hackneyed, but it is *not*.  This is the story of four friends who go to Las Vegas for a bachelor weekend to send off one of their group.  They plan to spend the night doing anything and everything, and then leaving it all behind because what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

The film starts conventionally, setting up the four main characters – Phil the school teacher (Bradley Cooper), who feels trapped by his wife and family and thinks nothing of pilfering his students’ field trip money to embiggen his Vegas stake; Stu the dentist (Ed Helms), whose harpy girlfriend is the distillation of every man’s worst nightmare; Doug the groom (Justin Bartha), the nice guy marrying the nice girl and whose nice families are nice; and Alan (Zach Galifianakis) the…the…cipher? …the…uh…weirdo? …er…pedophile? …um…genius??  Well, Alan is a puzzle as it’s hard to describe a man who is legally restricted from getting with 200 feet of a school (or a Chuckie Cheese), who learns card counting from a book and scores a bundle at the tables, who wonders if Caesar ever really lived at Caeser’s Palace, who blames Al Qaeda for society’s intolerance of masturbating on a commercial airliner, and who actually seems like a nice, if misunderstood (or un-understandable) guy.

These four borrow the prospective father-in-law’s classic convertible Mercedes and head across the desert to get their groove on in Vegas.  After they check-in to the hotel and do Jäger shots on the roof, the story flashes forward to the next morning, when Phil, Stu and Alan wake up to a Gordian knot of repercussions from the previous nights festivities.  Their $4,000/night suite is a wreck, a rooster struts and clucks among the carnage, there’s a baby in the closet, a tiger in the bathroom, and Doug is missing (and so is one of Stu’s teeth).

The rest of the film is the story of them trying to remember what happened so they can find Doug and get him to the church on time.  They piece the night together from clues and guesses, and retrace their steps on their quest for Doug.  And their path was long and winding, as well as outrageously hilarious.  I won’t go into any more details, but let’s just say that the movie deserves a second viewing, if only to catch the things you missed while you were laughing.

And it’s always nice to see the birth of a star – Zach Galifianakis shines throughout this film, in such a way that you can see that he has vaulted up the Hollywood pecking order on the strength of this performance alone, and should be able to leverage this appearance for a long and prosperous career, if that’s what he wants.  He doesn’t exactly steal the show, because the show is outrageous and over-the-top to begin with, but he definitely shines the brightest.  And the other central players should also see career boosts from this, although maybe not to the degree of Galifianakis.

Put it all together and you have a movie that is both intelligent and stupid, and is a true laugh riot.  Note that if you are easily offended by…well…anything, then you may want to skip this movie because there are a lot of offensive things in it.  However, they are not done for shock value, they flow naturally from the characters and storyline – but they are no less shocking.

And stay for the credits. 🙂

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Gimme my $3.50 matinee ticket price back!!

What a terrible waste of an afternoon out of the house!  At least we ate sushi.

When the ad campaign for Drag Me to Hell came out a few weeks ago, I was cautiously optimistic.  Over the years, Engineerboy has educated me in the way of Sam and Ivan Raimi: Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, and even Army of Darkness.  Hilarious, silly, fun, campy, sly horror.  Classics.  I’ll watch them any time they come on cable.  Who can resist … uh… deciduous molestation, anyway?  And Raimi’s a big-time director now, and the three Spidey films to his credit have given him the stick in Hollywood to go back to his old schtick.   

If only he had. 

Drag Me To Hell isn’t a fun, campy Raimi flick.  It isn’t even a straight-up good fright of a horror movie.  There elements of each are there, but you can’t just toss frozen beef and an uncut carrot into a pan and call it stew.  Nor can you splash some wine and lob a cupcake in the pot and hope it makes a whole meal.  A movie’s only campy if you commit to it and have some humor.  If you play it straight, even a little bit, the campy parts become lame.  At the same time, you lose your ability to do effective horror if you kowtow to the current market and, pardon the vulgarity, pussy out with a PG-13 rating, unless you’re really really creative.  

And this movie wasn’t.  Give me some exploding intestines, give me chopped up brains, if it’s straight up horror I’m okay with it.  (Although the best horror movies show some of the least, à la Jaws and Aliens).  But seriously?  This stuff?

Spoilers, blah blah blah…

A gypsy curse, really?  A fortune teller?  A girl who’s thin now but used to be fat as a kid?  Animal sacrifice?  The “I’m a Mac” guy?  (Actually he wasn’t bad with what they gave him to work with). 

I won’t even bother to detail the plot to great length, it’s so pedestrian.  Aspiring-career-girl-not-good-enough-for-rich-boyfriend’s-family, bank, gypsy, foreclosure,  tough moral decision, curse.  It’s exactly what you expect of throwaway PG-13 marketed-to-teens crappy-ass pseudo-horror dreck.  The soundtrack is obviously ominous to a fault, with omnipresent screeching Eastern European violins.  The girl hears weird sounds but oh it’s just a rusty gate.  On the path to her $2 million dollar rusticly completely furnished adorable house above the LA hills.  Oh but wait it’s the wind.  Oh wait it’s really the ghost of what must be the devil, because it’s a shadow with horns.   Oh, it breaks windows.  Yawn.

Then here comes the stuff that I couldn’t watch, the only way you can make PG-13 horror: the gross-out crap.  Ok, maggots,  fly in the sinuses, kinda creepy, we’ll allow it.  But the old lady’s body spewing embalming fluid all down the girl’s mouth?  (From which girl stands up shocked and marvelously un-spewed-upon).  Blood flying from her nose and spraying a 7′ radius?  Eyeballs popping out and the girl swallows them?  If this isn’t camp then what the hell is it?  It’s just stupid!

There were some Raimi trademarks, even sadder to see them so awkwardly used.  The low-but-fast-moving point-of-view of evil, the synth/doubled evil spirit voice, the suspended-in-midair possessed body hurling insults, an inanimate object suddenly animate and giving little squeaks as it’s “killed”… all trademark, all horribly out of place in a purports-to-be-serious horror film.   Throw in some humor, throw in a little Bruce Campbell, something, and this movie goes someplace fun.  Where’s the disembodied hand under a bucket with “Farewell to Arms” sitting on top of it?  Where’s the “Who’s laughing now?”  Where’s the mumbled misremembered incantation for the Book of the Dead? 

If I want serious horror, I’ll watch 28 Days Later.  If I want camp, I’ll re-watch Evil Dead II.   This movie could’ve been either but in trying to be both it was neither.  Personally, I wanted to love it because of the trademark touches that felt like they were honoring me as a true fan.  But honestly this dreck could’ve used a little more tuning and tinkering time in the workshed.  Better luck next time, boys.

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Honest(ly huge) Abe

We had never seen the first movie in this series, Night at the Museum, but ended up watching it a couple of days before going to see the new installment, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.  We found the first movie to be enjoyable and forgettable, but funny enough that we decided to go out and see the sequel this weekend.

Battle of the Smithsonian is, quite enjoyably, more of the same, but on a larger scale.  Many of the familiar characters from the first film are back again, and a host of new characters are added.  Also, this film takes place across the campus of the Smithsonian museum buildings, and makes sure to pull some of the personality of the museum itself into the mix.  Smithsonian isn’t trying to hide a history lesson inside a Ben Stiller action-comedy, far from it.  There are historical references, many of which will fly over the heads of the young target audience, like Sputnik.

For example, at one point in the film a couple of the characters step into the life-size print of the famous Life magazine photo of a returning sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square.  The characters wander around Times Square chased by Egyptian spearmen, and eventually step back into the Smithsonian.  Unfortunately, one of the characters has dropped his cell phone in the crowds, and a young serviceman picks it up and shouts after him that, hey, mister, you dropped your…whatever this thing is.  Later, over the end credits, we see that same young serviceman working at an electronics bench in the 40’s, and his mother calling him to dinner from the other room.  He tells her just a minute, he thinks he’s onto something, and she shouts back with the unbending will of mom’s everywhere and says, “You put down whatever that is and you get in here right this minute, Joey Motorola!”  There was a row of about a dozen 8-10 year old boys sitting in front of us, and they all spun around and stared at us when we cracked up at that line.

There are also Tuskegee airmen, simian astronauts, gangsters, Tsars, emporers, huns, painting subjects, and even NASA mission control techs (played by Clint Howard, who has recognizably played such techs in many other films) that will resonate much more deeply with older audience members, but which also provide an extra layer of humor apart from yet another predictable round of slapping the monkey.

The story of the current installment is that Kahmunrah, the evil older brother Ahkmenrah, has come to steal the magic plate from his younger brother.  The plate is what brings all the museum characters to life between sunset and sunrise each night.  Kahmunrah knows that the plate can be used to summon the army of the dead and allow him to take over both the day and night-time worlds.  It’s up to Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) and his band of pals to stop him.

Let’s just say that hilarity ensues, some of it juvenile, some of it more refined, some of it falls flat, but overall this is a funny and enjoyable film.  It won’t win any awards for the story or the acting, although it might get some technical awards for the effects, which are beautifully done.  Don’t go in expecting great art or even classic comedy – this film is a fine Memorial Day break, worth the price of a ticket and concessions, and you’ll walk out smiling.

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Dear American Idol Producers,

American Idol...Reborn?

Sigh.  Another season has ended, albeit with a surprise ending (Kris Allen defeating Adam Lambert), but the finale wasn’t watched in my household.  Again.  We didn’t watch last year, either.  And although we watched most of the episodes this season, we still watched many fewer than last season.

Over the years there have been several consistent issues we have with the show which continue to drain our enthusiasm.  If you care to know them, here they are:

Issue #1: Obvious no-talents singing before the judges during tryouts
I can see you all huddled in your planning meetings, hoping to strike some more William Hung-like ratings gold by putting through idiots, freaks, sad losers, and people whose singing talent is measured in the negative range.  However, that schtick is old and played out and should be retired.  As the judges are so fond of saying, and what keeps me watching, is that this is a singing competition.  Having your screeners put through some croaking clown to sing before the judges is a ludicrous and transparent ploy, please stop it.

Issue #2: The endless, manufactured backstories
During tryouts, you pick supposedly interesting/appealing contestants and provide us with behind-the-scenes looks at their lives, toils, challenges, and troubles.  However, at this early stage these are anonymous singers, so the program would be much more interesting and lively, in our opinion, if you would simply stage the singing competition.  Now, when you get to Hollywood and start paring down the contestants to an identifiable bunch, we might like to learn a *little* something about them…but just a little.  The endless biographing and attempts to manufacture pathos and drama are irksome.

Issue #3: Kara DioGuardi
Who?  Why?  The best way to describe her is to paraphrase Shakespeare thusly:  “Kara is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets her hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.  Her’s is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  Kara did not have one moment that we saw this season that wasn’t useless, irritating, or both, or somewhere in between.  And don’t get us started on her “song”, which is addressed further down in this article.

Issue #4: Country week
Do you have to kowtow to that demographic?  Have you even stopped to consider how many viewers it drives away (like us) compared to how many it attracts for that one, single episode?  Country music is not what American Idol is about, period, so don’t try to put a pig behind the lipstick – it insults the fans of both kinds of music.

Issue #5: Golden Idol awards
Really?  Just shorten the damn show by 15 minutes.  Please?  Even 15 minutes of dead air would be preferable.

Issue #6: An even number of judges
This puts too much power in the hands of Lord Cowell.  Have three judges…or five judges…but not four.  Having Simon deciding ties also renders the new “Judge’s Save” useless, and makes it “Simon’s Save”.

Issue #7: Lip-synching
This is a singing competition.  If the guests can’t sing live, or the group can’t learn to sing together live, then skip it.  It taints the rest of the program to see such obvious lip-synching by the guests and during the group songs.  It would be like having a slam-dunk competition in basketball, and inviting revered, retired players to perform, but then having to lower the backboard and/or provide them with a springboard in order to actually dunk.  It’s demeaning to the performers and insulting to the viewers, so please stop it.

Issue #8: The horrible finale song
This is the worst issue of all.  When each new season starts, we already start dreading having to sit through the inevitably atrocious, amateurish, pathetic, soulless, empty, fawning, shallow, superficial song that is written for the last show.  There hasn’t been a single one that wasn’t a horrific affront to all things musical.  And it is the absolute wrong note to strike at the end of American Idol.  Over the course of the season, contestants improve.  The bar gets raised each show.  The songs and themes get better and better.  Tension builds.  Over the last two or three weeks each contestant has proven their worthiness, and each is a valid potential star.  They swing for the fences, and we all get swept along with them, big voices and big talents tackling big songs, the skill and expertise are awe-inspiring, the artistry is soul-enriching.  Until…like the giant, wet fart of an incontinent walrus….bbrrrppfppfppptttthhhh…that lame-ass final song.  *That’s* what we’ve been building up to?  A crappy and trite slice of pabulum not even fit for the discount bin?  Please, in the name of all humanity, please stop torturing us with this horrific ending.  Please.

I see today that the finale had all-time low ratings, and I can’t say that I’m surprised.  Listen, Idol Producers, your show is still solid.  You don’t need to do more non-singing-related bullshit, you need to do less.  Strip it down to a singing competition.  If you want to add something to it, make it about the singing and performing.  How about a jury night in Hollywood?  Bring in nine additional musical noteworthies/legends, make Simon the foreman, and have the jury decide on the final 24, or something like that? 

Make sure that the entire focus of the show is on the quality of the singers and of the songs.  Go back to the original three judges: Simon Cowell, Paul Abdul, and Randy Jackson.  If you end up having to make changes, please pick people who will be interesting and relevant, unlike Kara, who is neither.  And keep Ryan Seacrest, he continues to be an affable and unflappable host, the circus master who always seems to strike the correct note.

You have a great product, but it’s like you’ve taken a classic Rolls-Royce and tricked it out with fiberglass effects, tinted windows, neon running lights, and subwoofer in the trunk.  Strip away the cheap bling and flashy trash, and be what you are – a pure and classic singing competition.

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Boldly Going Again

We saw the new Star Trek movie today (opening night), and it was fantastic.  To give some context, I’m an old geezer and religiously watched the original Star Trek series during its initial run, and many more times in syndication.  I’ve seen the Star Trek movies that included the original cast.  I never really got into any of the subsequent Trek series, films, fanfic, spin-offs, books, conventions, etc, so I’m not a slavish Trek nerd, but I’m an old guard, indigenous Trek fan.

And coming from that perspective, my take is that J.J. Abrams did a great job of refreshing and updating the original Star Trek series with this prequel, and he was both faithful to the original and also daring enough to make changes in what felt to be a near-perfect proportion.  The new cast, playing younger versions of the original characters, do a pitch-perfect job of capturing the essence of their characters without seeming like they are doing imitations. 

The Original Star Trek (TOST) has been around for so long that I was skeptical that it could be refreshed in any meaningful way.  However, this new episode should jump-start a whole new incarnation of the franchise.  I can tell you that I’m excitedly awaiting the next film in this series, after having seen this version once a few hours ago. 

WARNING: Spoiler ahead, don’t read any further if you don’t want to know anything about the plot.
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The film starts with a sequence that includes the birth of James T. Kirk, and I have to say that it was so well done that I got a bit misty-eyed.  As the film progresses we see early scenes of many of the main characters, prior to their meeting each other.  Eventually, fate plays a hand and puts *most* of them aboard the Enterprise, albeit not in their familiar roles/ranks, at least not initially.  However, by the end of the film, all of the key characters from TOST are present and accounted for (and in their correct roles).

In between there is a reasonably engaging story that involves time travel, the destruction of one character’s home planet, a meetup between a character’s new incarnation and their older self played by the original actor, dealing with a vengeful enemy, and unexpected love blooming.  The action and effects sequences are superbly well-done, and don’t jolt you out of your enjoyment like so many other of Hollywood’s expensive-yet-clumsy digital effects behemoths.  This film is more along the lines of Iron Man, where the effects serve only to enhance the story, never to *be* the story or distract you from the storytelling.

All of the new cast members inhabit their characters fully, and capture the essence of the original characters beautifully.  I didn’t quite buy Chris Pine as Kirk for the first few scenes, but by the end, in my mind, he *was* Kirk – and it’s hard to consider anyone but Shatner as Kirk.  But Pine does a great job with what could have been tragicomic mockery of Shatner’s Kirk.

Zachary Quinto does a great job as Spock, and his character has the most emphasis in the ensemble.  John Cho (yes, Harold from Harold and Kumar) is solid as Sulu, Karl Urban almost seems like DeForest Kelley Junior, Anton Yelchin is suitably non-fluent as Chekov, and Zoe Saldana plays Uhura complete with cat-eyelashes and enough sex appeal (and smarts) to entice a young Vulcan.

Bruce Greenwood plays Christopher Pike, who will be familiar to any TOST fan as the immobile, wheelchair bound, disfigured character from the initial episodes of Trek.  Here he is the elder statesman, dealing with (and educating) his young charges.

There are also familiar faces in various roles.  Winona Ryder plays Spock’s human mother, while Tyler Perry (yes, from Tyler Perry’s This and Tyler Perry’s That) plays a Star Fleet Admiral.  But most enjoyable of all is Simon Pegg as Montgomery Scott.  Yes, Shaun of the Dead is Scotty, and he is hilarious.

The film also manages to include a lot of the catch phrases and conceits of the original series without them seeming forced.  Spock says “Fascinating”.  Bones says “I’m a doctor, not a ____”.  Kirk slouches on one elbow in the captain’s chair, looking pensive.  Scotty has to struggle to deliver more power.  The ensign in the red shirt dies.  Bones calls Spock a green-blooded hobgoblin.  Phasers are set to stun, shields are set to full power, photon torpedoes are fired, and people are beamed all over the place.  In other words, this film *is* Star Trek, and I hope this new incarnation will live long, and prosper.

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Carrey, del Toro, and Penn?!?

If today were April 1st I might think that this article was a joke:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/nyuk-nyukhuh-sean-penn-joins-three-stooges-movie/?ref=movies

That’s a blog post on the New York Times site which claims that Hollywood will be making a Three Stooges movie, and the Stooges will be played by…brace yourself…get ready…Jim Carrey (getting fat to play Curly), Sean Penn (as the bozo-fringed Larry), and Benecio del Toro (as Moe, the living superego). 

Uhhhh….huh?  My confusion led me to deduce that the film would be a tortured look at the sad reality behind the farcical public personas, but then I noticed that the screenplay is being written by the Farrelly Brothers (Bobby and Peter, most famous for There’s Something About Mary and Kingpin, neither of which had much seriousness to them).

So I can’t reconcile this information – something has to be wrong and/or it will never happen.  However, if this amalgamation ever makes it to the screen, I’ll be first in line.

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